Friday 28 February 2014

ColdFusion 11: undocumented new feature regarding <cfprocessingdirective>

G'day:
I can't see this documented anywhere, other than as a passing comment in the bug tracker, so I figured I'd mention it here.

Last week I raised a ticket "<cfprocessingdirective> not implemented in CFScript", which observed that the generic CFScript equivalent of <cfprocessingdirective> (which should be cfprocessingdirective()) had not been implemented.

It has indeed not been implemented, but not due to any oversight, but because of this:

  • Awdhesh Kumar
    5:28:51 AM GMT+00:00 Feb 26, 2014
    cfprocessingdirective tag is a special tag and is handled differently because of which it is could not be supported as the generic script syntax of the tag. This tag is used to specify the template encoding. In Splendor, we are auto detecting the page encoding and hence most of the time it will not be required to set processingdirective.
That's actually fairly significant news!

So - to be clear - we no longer need to explicitly tell the ColdFusion compiler what the character encoding of a source code file is... it'll work it out for itself. Like how other text-processing applications such as notepad.exe have been able to do for years.

So... a bit late to the party, but ColdFusion eventually got there.

I've given this a superficial test, and it seems to work, too. Cool.

And that's all.

--
Adam