Jacob, My biggest concern with your idea of "we don't work together so it's ok" is this...
Let's just say you you get fired or go on vacation tomorrow. Your company has to hire someone or someone has to maintain your code while your out. If you are not using a standard or best practice to "Scope" your variables then the person maintaining your code has to weed through it and figure out what variables are what. If you don't scope your variables it makes it harder to figure out where your variables are coming from. In my opinion, do what you want but hopefully I never have to go through the pain of maintaining code that doesn't use best practices. As for converting Form and URL variables, I convert them to the "request" scope. That way I only have mess with a single scope when using form and URL variables. Cheers. Dan -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jacob Cameron Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 6:27 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Since its so quiet lately . . . As I said earlier today when I was talking to someone, I won't use any names:) Sometimes you want to leave scope off of form and URL mainly for their use. If they are referring to my code, they will notice that there is always scoping used on CGI, Cookie, session and a lot of other variables. Do I normally avoid them, yes when writing form validation code so I don't have to type as much. If I would do something as backwards as looping through an entire scope to reset one scope to another and claim it to be faster, who could possibly think that finding a work around to try and make your statement true would possibly be logical? I didn't say there was anything wrong with scoping, simply that I don't do it on form and URL normally unless I am doing it for security reasons. In my mind, scoping is not a must. A knowledge of its existence in the world sure, but if I had my way. Everyone would start learning to code with ANSI C so they learn about scoping from that as I did. And as many of you know, I also believe that if you say that you should 'always' do something in code, then you are very narrow minded. Do you think allowing none scoped variables in CF and ASP was an accident? A bug? Or are you just smarter than the creators of these scripting languages? Also, in the past I have created sites that have received over 1 million hits in one hour and currently work on a site that receives over 2 million hits a day. You work on sites that get 1000 hits a day if they are luck, more like 1000 a month. In my mind, worrying about this kind of stuff is a waste of your time an your employers. Code anyway you want. I code my way, that I know works and have testing in live environments, not looping on beta code. If you want to code your way that is fine, we don't even work together. I cannot see the difference in load times from scoping or not scoping url or form variables, so you are right because you think you are? As you said this afternoon, you can loop through it 1 million times and see a difference. If you get 1 million hits in one second or less to a website you created, you will run out of threads before a single web server will be able to serve it an everyone will be waiting in line anyway. In talking about speed, there is a lot more involved than scoping a variable. Do any of the sites you have created or maintain get that many hits? Are they on a single server or on multiple. Mine is on a single server running CF 5.0. Jacob -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of S.Isaac Dealey Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 5:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Since its so quiet lately . . . I was pretty slack about scoping variables when I first started working with ColdFusion and for a while I tried to leave form and url variables unscoped intentionally, although I've given up that habbit. I like to copy all my form and url variables into an attributes structure in the application.cfm which allows me to use base templates as custom tags if the need arises and it's only 3 short, sweet lines of code. (It's one of the nicer tricks from Fusebox) If you use New Atlanta's BlueDragon server it's only 2 lines of code because BlueDragon automatically combines the form and url variables, so referencing form[var] is the same as referencing url[var]. I've mostly gotten out of the habbit of unscoped variables, and try even with the variables scope to scope them because sometimes when you don't scope them during a set statement they don't actually get into the variables scope, although I don't know how or why they don't. If I need a temp variable quickly for a loop or the like, I'll frequently use a single character variable like x or i unscoped, only if I know that I've set it and am making all references to it in the same template. And of course, if it's in a function or a CFC method, I always make sure to use <var> to declare the same single-character variables just in case. Is scoping one of the first things a cf developer should learn? Maybe. I think so. I know the question of scoping has sparked minor flame wars on the cf-talk list. Not by any means like the flame wars sparked by the issue of locking, but they've happened. s. isaac dealey 972-490-6624 team macromedia volunteer http://www.macromedia.com/go/team chief architect, tapestry cms http://products.turnkey.to onTap is open source http://www.turnkey.to/ontap > Thought I would spark up a quick discussion. > I was discussing a few things with a coder (no names), and I raised > the subject of scoping variables. > I am a real stickler when it comes to scoping variables. Other than > obvious performance gain, and not having the issue of values bleeding > from one scope into another - scoping simply makes code much easier to > read. > Looking at the variable #customer# tells you there is a variable named > customer. Looking at the variable #form.customer# or > #qInvoice.customer# tells you where the value came from and some > insight on how it is going to be used, why, etc... (Especially when > you deal with more than one page per > request) > I do on the other hand leave local scoped variables alone (the > variables.[name] scope) - Which I think is standard practice, and > there is no ambiguity when only one scope follows such a convention. > I was curious if anyone else had a differing view of scoping. Perhaps > (though I highly doubt) someone can give me an example of when leaving > off the scope of a variable name has an actual advantage. > The only idea that was half valid was using either form/url scope. > This of course can be solved by coping one scope into the other and > can be done in a few lines, so in the end, I don't think it's much of > a valid point at all. > Am I alone in thinking scoping variables is an absolute must, and > pretty much day one stuff? > Best Regards, > Nate Nielsen > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ----------------------------------------------- > To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: > Send UNSUBSCRIBE to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / > unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org ----------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: Send UNSUBSCRIBE to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org ----------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: Send UNSUBSCRIBE to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org ----------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: Send UNSUBSCRIBE to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org
