>Generally speaking imho it's best for custom tags to be "black boxes" >if possible, in other words, feed it everything it needs as an >attribute, and know what it returns (if anything). That way other >templates never have to know anything about how the custom tag >functions, all they have to know is what to pass to the tag and what >to expect in response. Imho if you plan to use the custom tags >directory, don't use the application scope directly -- feed those >variables to it as attributes. Otherwise call the tags using relative >paths (which is what I do anyway, and imho is better since it's more >controlled), or a cf server mapping (which I avoid for the reason that >they're difficult to get if you have shared hosting).
I agree with you 100%. I guess I should explain a little more what I am trying to do...maybe there will be a solution that does not involve the application scope at all, or maybe I'll just throw out what I'm trying to do. I have a custom tag that parses an HTML "template" and inserts content into specially marked regions in the template. Since these templates change rarely (days or weeks or months without changing), I thought that preparsing the template and storing in a persistent scope a representation of the parsed template, ready for content insertion, would result in performance gains. I must say here that I got the idea from what the Fusebox 4 Loader file does (http://beta.fusebox.org/index.cfm?method=Fusebox4.basicConcepts, 3rd paragraph under the Lifecycle section). I naturally thought that the application scope would be most appropriate, but I ran into the issue that it may run across situations where no cfapplication tag has been executed and thus the application scope is unusable. So I wanted to be able to test for that case. Gyrus has shown us the code to check if the application scope is usable. So I guess my question now is, am I getting into something messy and perhaps dangerous anyway by using application variables in a custom tag? It satisfies the "black box" concept because the application variables it uses are completely internal to the tag - caller templates do not need to know anything about that. But it could be argued that using the application scope as I am could cause other problems (I can't name any, but perhaps there are potential problems) or is just bad programming practice. But I prefer to write well-mannered code. Any thoughts, anyone? Thanks Mike Mertsock Alfred University Web Team [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?forumid=4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=subscribe&forumid=4 FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Host with the leader in ColdFusion hosting. Voted #1 ColdFusion host by CF Developers. Offering shared and dedicated hosting options. www.cfxhosting.com/default.cfm?redirect=10481 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
