Think-Lab

CFDUMP

Posted by DOMINUS, Posted on December 16, 2008 When I first started out as a ColdFusion developer, one of the more frustrating challenges wasn?t learning new tags or how to use Homesite, but rather how to handle data being passed in a form. Early on I would create my form page, and then write the action page to handle the data and hope it didn?t throw an error. Let?s just say, I became very familiar with the ColdFusion error page. It was frustrating at times and very inefficient.

Then I was introduced to the CFDUMP tag. Not only did this tag lead to some humorous (and of course extremely childish) jokes, but it also changed my life as a developer. I no longer had to guess if a record ID was being passed into my action page. Nor did I have to wonder if the value of the variable I was trying to insert in to my table was correct. All of the variables available to me were displayed neatly on my screen so I could handle the data with confidence. This saved me time and reduced the aggravation of writing code.

Of course, CFDUMP is not your only method for debugging your code. Using the ColdFusion Administrator?s debugging options opens up a wide range of information about your project. For instance, enabling robust exception information gives you information about template paths, SQL statements used and data source names. There are many other helpful debugging tools built into ColdFusion to make your life as a developer easier. CFDUMP is easy to use, saves you time and reduces aggravation. Check it out for yourself.

2 comments - Posted by DOMINUS at 12:00 PM - Categories: Coldfusion | Misc