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Programming ColdFusion
book

Programming ColdFusion

by Rob Brooks-Bilson
August 2001
Intermediate to advanced
976 pages
38h 8m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming ColdFusion

Grouping Output

The CFOUTPUT tag has an attribute called GROUP that lets you to group output from your record sets before displaying it to the browser. There are two ways to use the GROUP attribute of the CFOUTPUT tag. The first method uses GROUP to remove any duplicate rows from the query result set.[7] This is useful in situations where the result set you return from a query contains duplicate rows of data but you want to display only unique records.

Example 4-3 demonstrates what happens when you query a table containing duplicate values and output the results without using the GROUP attribute of the CFOUTPUT tag.

Example 4-3. Failing to Use the GROUP Attribute Results in Duplicate Values in the Output

<CFQUERY NAME="GetDepartment" DATASOURCE="ProgrammingCF">
         SELECT Department
         FROM EmployeeDirectory
         ORDER BY Department
</CFQUERY>


<HTML>
<HEAD>
    <TITLE>Using GROUP to remove duplicate records</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<H2>Departments:</H2>
<CFOUTPUT QUERY="GetDepartment">
#Department#<BR>
</CFOUTPUT>

</BODY>
</HTML>

As you can see in Figure 4-2, executing the template results in many of the same values being output more than once.

Duplicate records are displayed because GROUP wasn’t used

Figure 4-2. Duplicate records are displayed because GROUP wasn’t used

This is easy enough to fix. To remove the duplicates from the output, all you have to do is modify the line of code containing the CFOUTPUT tag to read like this:

<CFOUTPUT QUERY="GetDepartment" ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565926986Catalog PageErrata