Comments on: CF8 – dbvarname supported or not?

By: Jorgen

Jorgen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:26:36 +0000

I can confirm that CF8 will throw errors if some and not all parameters have dbvarname specified.
This was the only issue I had when upgrading my apps from CF7 to CF8. I found the documentation lacking. (Enterprise version, Windows).

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:52:40 +0000

I have noticed that CF8 still notices the attribute because if you have it on some but not all parameters in the proc, it throws an error saying that you have to use it for all or none.

By: todd sharp

todd sharp — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:35:13 +0000

FWIW – didn’t you have to use @varname for it to work anyways? I always forget…

By: Charlie Arehart

Charlie Arehart — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:13:04 +0000

Hey John, I was piqued by your title when I saw it on FullAsAGoog, as indeed it’s an issue near and dear to my heart. You’re right that I did include it in my talk, because I’d seen reference to it elsewhere. I just hadn’t yet tried it. When I did a few weeks ago, and learned it was no longer there, I pulled it from the talk. Shame to see that it was. I’ve had some people confide over the years that they have code from CF5 where the volume of changes needed to get it to work without DBVarName has been enough that they’ve been reluctant to upgrade. It’s a shame. As Dan says, perhaps the best solution is an option to enable/disable it per DSN or per app (as opposed to an attribute of CFSTOREDPROC, which again would require change to the code.)

By: Dan G. Switzer, II

Dan G. Switzer, II — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:27:56 +0000

I’m actually hoping that if they ever do start supporting it again, it’s feature that can be toggled off/on. We use the dbvarname in our code, but strictly for documentation purposes. The problem is the names might not match exactly in some cases. Since it doesn’t currently work, if there’s any kind of spelling mistake, it wouldn’t show up until the feature actually starts working. So, I hope it’s an option that can be turned off/on if Adobe does actually decide to turn it on again.

By: Steven Erat

Steven Erat — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:18:54 +0000

That’s correct, the use of dbvarname and its named notation of SP parameters is not supported in any ColdFusion release since CF5. An significant engineering effort went into trying to add it back to CF8, but in the end the behavior wasn’t perfect and it was pulled.

By: todd sharp

todd sharp — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:42:54 +0000

I can not remember where I saw it, but it was documented somewhere that it is not longer supported. Nothing wrong with positional arguments…Just make sure they are nullable in your proc and add the null="#not len(varName)#" trick and you’ll be fine