ColdFusion Error... But No Error Found
Posted July 12, 2006 at 6:29 PM by Ben Nadel
I just spent an hour working with Simon to debug a page code template. The reason it took so long was not due to the complexity of the page itself, but rather because no error was showing up. More than that, nothing was showing up on the screen or in the page source at all. CFError (the global site error handler) wasn't catching anything. The CFTry / CFCatch blocks weren't catching anything. It was like the page wasn't even being run!
After commenting much of the code out and then uncommenting, we narrowed the error down to one CFQuery tag. We still didn't know what the error was, but at least we knew where it was happening (without this CFQuery tag, the page ran fine). This is what the query looked like (I built a query here on the fly to demonstrate the use of names, but the INSERT was similar):
- <!--- Create a test query. --->
- <cfset qGirls = QueryNew( "name" ) />
-
- <!--- Add rows to the query. --->
- <cfset QueryAddRow( qGirls ) />
- <cfset qGirls[ "name" ][ qGirls.CurrentRow ] = "Sara Vivenzio" />
-
- <cfset QueryAddRow( qGirls ) />
- <cfset qGirls[ "name" ][ qGirls.CurrentRow ] = "Madonna" />
-
- <cfset QueryAddRow( qGirls ) />
- <cfset qGirls[ "name" ][ qGirls.CurrentRow ] = "Ashley Thomas" />
-
- <!--- Output loop over the records. --->
- <cfoutput query="qGirls">
-
- <!--- Insert each girl's last name. --->
- <cfquery name="qInsert" datasource="#REQUEST.DSN.Source#" username="#REQUEST.DSN.Username#" password="#REQUEST.DSN.Password#">
- INSERT INTO testing
- (
- name
- ) VALUES (
- <cfqueryparam
- value="#ListGetAt( qGirls.name, 2, ' ' )#"
- cfsqltype="CF_SQL_VARCHAR"
- />
- );
- </cfquery>
-
- </cfoutput>
Did you spot the error? The line:
- <cfqueryparam
- value="#ListGetAt( qGirls.name, 2, ' ' )#"
- cfsqltype="CF_SQL_VARCHAR"
- />
... will fail on the second row of the query. There is no " " character delimiting the first and last name as there is only one name (and only one Madonna). The weird thing was, no error was being thrown. The page simply crapped out and didn't give us any information at all. I don't have access to it at the moment, but I am interested in what the server logs tell us; maybe they recorded something.
Now, please note, I CANNOT reproduce this error in my code. I am working on a different server. This makes me think that his server might not have all the ColdFusion updates? I don't know. But, if your queries every crap out and leave you no hints, try hard-coding values for all your CFQueryParam tags. I should have done that right off the bat, but it never occurred to me that no error would be produced.
