Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1: Getting Started

Working with Conditional Processing

Chapter 8, “The Basics of CFML,” introduced two ColdFusion tags (<cfoutput> and <cfset>), functions, and variables. This chapter takes CFML one big step further, adding conditional and programmatic processing, the stuff that starts to add real power to your code.

The code you wrote in the last chapter was linear—ColdFusion started at the top of the page and processed every line in order. And although that works for simple applications, more often than not you’ll need to write code that does various things based on conditions, such as:

• Displaying different messages based on the time of day or day of the week

• Personalizing content based on user login

• Informing users of the status of searches or other operations ...