Oh dear, a dodgy old piece of code in ColdFusion 8 style with local scopes!

A seldom used piece of code fell victim to the "new" ColdFusion "Local scope" from CF 9 (Centaur)

With an Application.cfc; naturally everything inside it is local'ish when the onRequest exists:
<cfcomponent displayname="Application" output="true" hint="Handle the application.">
    <cffunction name="OnRequestStart" access="public" returntype="boolean" output="false">
        <cfargument name="TargetPage" type="string" required="true"    />
        <cfreturn true />
    </cffunction>
    <cffunction name="OnRequest" access="public" returntype="void" output="true">
        <cfargument    name="TargetPage" type="string" required="true" />
        <cfinclude template="#arguments.TargetPage#" />
        <cfreturn />
    </cffunction>
</cfcomponent>


Suppose a simple file called ohdear.cfm

<cfset local.myvar = "abc">


included from a file here say runme.cfm:

<cfset url.myvar= "123">
<cfoutput>#myvar#</cfoutput><!--- outputs 123 --->
<cfinclude template="ohdear.cfm">
<cfdump var="#local.myvar#"><!--- outputs abc --->
<cfoutput>#myvar#</cfoutput><!--- lookup to the url scope, whoops, local is first, outputs abc, Doh! --->

So the output is: 123 abc abc


If only an Application.cfm, with no Application.cfc, then the result is completely different: 111 abc 111

Must have been a stroke of genius to think that it would be cool to use local as a scope within an include file :)

FYI; according to CF 9 and the documentation; the scope precedence is :

  1. Local (function-local, UDFs and CFCs only)
  2. Arguments
  3. Thread local (inside threads only)
  4. Query (not a true scope; variables in query loops)
  5. Thread
  6. Variables
  7. CGI
  8. Cffile
  9. URL
  10. Form
  11. Cookie
  12. Client




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