Screwy issue when defining a string. (cfif within a cfset)

Posted At : March 13, 2009 5:51 PM | Posted By : Adrian J. Moreno
Related Categories: ColdFusion, WTF

I was browsing through some tickets in Jira today when I found a couple of bugs related to tables not displaying correctly in MSIE. When I found an example, it basically looked like a <TR> tag had not been closed correctly. When I viewed the source HTML, imagine how surprised I was to find a <cfif> statement gumming up the works.

Disclaimer

I inherited this code.

The Problem

The report I was looking at pulls from a few different tables, including a Notes table. Some notes are entered manually and others are automatically created by the system. When I checked the table, I found quite a few notes that contained the same statement.

The Code

This is the line of code in question:

Let's make a string

<cfset foo = structNew() />
<cfset str = "" />

<cfset foo.firstName = "Adrian" />
<cfset foo.lastName = "Moreno" />
<cfset foo.phone = "5551234567" />
<cfset foo.fax = "5551234568" />

<cfset str = str & "#foo.firstName# #foo.lastName# [<cfif foo.phone NEQ "">(#Left(foo.phone,3)#) #Mid(foo.phone,4,3)#-#Mid(foo.phone,7,4)# | </cfif>(#Left(foo.fax,3)#) #Mid(foo.fax,4,3)#-#Mid(foo.fax,7,4)# (f)]">

The actual code gets data from a query, not a struct, but the effect is the same. If you were to render this CFML, you'd get this output:

<cfoutput> Firefox:

Adrian Moreno [(555) 123-4567 | (555) 123-4568 (f)]

MSIE:

Adrian Moreno [<cfif foo.phone NEQ ">(555) 123-4567 | (555) 123-4568 (f)]

If you do a View Source, you'll see that the actual rendered value of the CFML variable str is:

Picture Kyle's mom going, "What, what, what?!?"

Adrian Moreno [<cfif foo.phone NEQ ">(555) 123-4567 | </cfif>(555) 123-4568 (f)]

WTF?

It's this string that's stored in the Notes table. MSIE is getting to </cfif> and then pitches a fit. Firefox doesn't know what a CFIF tag is, so it just skips over it and displays the text alone.

If you'll notice, the opening cfif tag was checking if foo.phone was an empty string:

but the rendered string only has the one double quote:

So why didn't ColdFusion throw an error here?

Testing

Let's create another string that doesn't contain any CF variables:

And the output:

Hello there my name is not an empty string " it's Adrian.

Ok, that makes sense. The outer double quotes define the string, so any pair of double quotes next to each other like this are replaced with a single double quote, which is the expected functionality.

So maybe losing the pair of double quotes within the CFIF tag causes ColdFusion to skip over parsing it?

Let's change the original code to use single quotes in the CFIF:

<cfset str = str & "#foo.firstName# #foo.lastName# [<cfif foo.phone NEQ ''>(#Left(foo.phone,3)#) #Mid(foo.phone,4,3)#-#Mid(foo.phone,7,4)# | </cfif>(#Left(foo.fax,3)#) #Mid(foo.fax,4,3)#-#Mid(foo.fax,7,4)# (f)]">

And the rendered HTML source:

Adrian Moreno [<cfif foo.phone NEQ ''>(555) 123-4567 | </cfif>(555) 123-4568 (f)]

Allllllllrighty then.

Conclusion

I think it's safe to say that ColdFusion can parse variables within a string definition, but it won't parse tags. In order to get the intended output from this code, it needs to be updated like this:

Rendered HTML source:

Adrian Moreno [(555) 123-4567 | (555) 123-4568 (f)]

In conclusion, I think this shows that you can't just write your code and assume it will work as expected, even when no errors are thrown. Test, test and again test your output to make sure it's correct.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go update ~3 years of records in that table.

Comments (5) |

Print |

Send |

del.icio.us |

Digg It! |

Linking Blogs | 2141 Views

Comments (Comment Moderation is enabled. Your comment will not appear until approved.)

[Add Comment]

This is a good place to use IIf().

Or.. if spacing doesn't matter, you can try using CfSavecontent tag.

Having a cfif inside a cfset is just a bad idea. :-)

# Posted By Henry Ho | 3/13/09 8:33 PM

I've seen a classic example of this before, where some code had been changed in a hurry (not by me) and a cfif/cfelse had made it's way into a multi-line string, where it was previously not in a string and was working fine. The result was that it appeared as if *both* the true and false branches of the if/else statement were being executed in a single pass, which is of course impossible, yet upon first glance it wasn't terribly obvious as to why the impossible seemed to be happening!

# Posted By Justin Carter | 3/13/09 11:24 PM

Just a note that it would be possible, but NOT advisable, to do

<cfoutput>#evaluate(str)#</cfoutput>

That *would* render the embedded <cfif>, but your solution of properly building the string is the _right_ way of approaching it.

# Posted By Jason Fisher | 3/14/09 1:01 AM

FYI: IIf() and evaluate() are more expensive to process than <cfif> and array notation respectively. While it might not be noticeable on a one-off, it is quite noticeable in a large loop.