Everything You Must Know About ColdFusion Variables - Developing ColdFusion Content
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ColdFusion content can be generated by any text editor, such as Notepad or WordPad. You can also use Macromedia Dreamweaver to create content with its WYSIWIG capabilites. Using Sapien Technologies Primal Script 3.1, and similar products, one can generate the CF content. Search the web to find WYSIWIG ColdFusion Editors, and you will find a couple of others. Some of the in-built intellisense like capabilites help in rapid development of applications. For example, see the dropdown help in the choice of tags in Sapien's Primal Script 3.1. For most of our examples just Notepad will be used.
ColdFusion Variables
Variables are at the heart of programming languages and ColdFusion is no exception. Variables are containers of information kept in memory. Manipulation of variables with operators using the built-in logic is what programming is about. Variables are the building blocks. It is necessary to have a good understanding of what variables are, what is their scope (or lifetime of their existence), what types of data they can hold, and so on.
We saw earlier how to create a variable using the <cfset> tag. What we did was create a variable by assigning a value to it. This is the most common way to create a variable. CFScript, supported by ColdFusion 6.1 is another JavaScript-like extension which can be used to write ColdFusion logic. CFScript can also be used for assigning values to variables using assigning statements. We will look at some examples during this tutorial.
ColdFusion auto generates some variables that give information about the results of certain tags and some operations. Specifically, for example <cffile> tag returns file size information through its cffile.filesize reference. There are many such tags that return variables.
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