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Ben Nadel at NCDevCon 2011 (Raleigh, NC) with: Anthony Mineo and Matthew Clemente
Ben Nadel at NCDevCon 2011 (Raleigh, NC) with: Anthony Mineo Matthew Clemente

Exception Types In CFCatch Blocks Do Not Have To Be Quoted

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Published in Comments (1)

This is a really minor post, but this morning, I made a small syntax discovery regarding ColdFusion's CFTry / CFCatch statements - the error types do not have to be quoted. This is true even if the type contains a dot-delimited hierarchy. Here's a quick example:

<cfscript>

	try {

		throw( type = "Foo" );

	} catch ( "Foo" error ) {

		writeOutput( "Caught Quoted: #error.type# <br />" );

	}

	try {

		throw( type = "Foo.Bar" );

	} catch ( "Foo.Bar" error ) {

		writeOutput( "Caught Quoted: #error.type# <br />" );

	}


	// ------------------------------------------------------ //
	// Type value not quoted in CFCatch.
	// ------------------------------------------------------ //


	try {

		throw( type = "Foo" );

	} catch ( Foo error ) {

		writeOutput( "Caught Unquoted: #error.type# <br />" );

	}

	try {

		throw( type = "Foo.Bar" );

	} catch ( Foo.Bar error ) {

		writeOutput( "Caught Unquoted: #error.type# <br />" );

	}

</cfscript>

Notice that the type in the Catch block is only quoted in the first two Try/Catch statements, but not in the second two. When we run the above code, we get the following output:

Caught Quoted: Foo
Caught Quoted: Foo.Bar
Caught Unquoted: Foo
Caught Unquoted: Foo.Bar

All catch blocks worked as expected. Pretty cool!

Want to use code from this post? Check out the license.

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Ben Nadel