Date Looping Using ColdFusion Custom DateLoop Tag

I have talked at length about date looping in ColdFusion both in terms of calendars as well as plain old indexed loops. Looping works particularly well if you want to do some sort of day-based increment for your loop. This is because in ColdFusion (and many other technologies), a Day can be represented as 1 (or a fraction of 1). Once you get out of a day-based increment, things get a bit more tricky. Incrementing by weeks, week days, years, or any other non-consistent value makes things more complicated.

To try and keep this very easy and simple, I created this really simple ColdFusion custom tag that elegantly handles looping through dates in a highly intuitive way. This ColdFusion custom tag, DateLoop.cfm, basically is a modified version of the CFLoop tag that ColdFusion already uses. In addition to the normal Index, From, To, and Step attributes, DateLoop.cfm also provides a DatePart attribute. This attribute can hold any value that is valid as the "date part" argument for the DateAdd() ColdFusion function.

Here is how it can be used; here, we are going to loop over all days in August:

This gives us the following (abridged) output:

{ts '2007-08-01 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-02 00:00:00'}
....
{ts '2007-08-30 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-31 00:00:00'}

As you can see, we are invoke the ColdFusion custom tag using the "cf_" construct. Of course, we are only adding a day at a time - nothing special. In fact, this is exactly how a CFLoop index loop would work (minus the date formatting). The power of a ColdFusion custom tag like this is that you can now start to use different DatePart values.

In this example, we are going to loop over August, but only include week days:

Notice that our <cf_dateloop /> tag now has the attribute DatePart set to "w". This gives us the following output:

{ts '2007-08-01 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-02 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-03 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-06 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-07 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-08 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-09 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-10 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-13 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-14 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-15 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-16 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-17 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-20 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-21 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-22 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-23 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-24 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-27 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-28 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-29 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-30 00:00:00'}
{ts '2007-08-31 00:00:00'}

Notice that weekend days (ex. 08/04, 08/05, 08/11) are skipped over.

I think this adds some really intuitive functionality for Date-based looping. Here is the ColdFusion custom tag that makes this possible:

The only drawback to the DateLoop.cfm ColdFusion custom tag is that because it is using the ColdFusion function DateAdd(), it is limited by the DateAdd() rules. In particular, the "step" value must be an integer. So, where as with a standard CFLoop you could have incremented by ".5", DateLoop.cfm requires an integer "step" value.

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