A student approached me the other day. She were gathering search criteria in a form and wanted to save the criteria to a session variable. But when she moved from page to page, her session variable lost its values.

The issue is with the the variable scoping that takes place on a form structure. Forms have a local "non-persistent" variable scope (they are only specific to that page, or the page called from the form and don't hang around).

Session variables are by nature persistent, or can exist beyond a single page, lasting for the user's session length.

When the entire form structure was saved as a session variable structure as above, that session structure received the same scoping as the form structure.

So...

Since this student wanted to only save those form fields that were had been completed and do some data tweaking on the information, I had her rewrite the snipped of code to loop through the form, pick out the variables to keep, then save those to the session variable.

Now this student had her trimmed form list saved as a structure in the format she wanted.

Project Seven has great products for increasing the pinache and functionality of any website. Their Image Gallery creates a slideshow of images in a 'filmstrip' type of gallery. When HHWD created this for Aiken's Makin's website, it was instantly a huge hit.

Another client, with a CF8 website wanted the same functionality with their home tour. But it needed to be able to pull photos from two locations and build the image gallery on the fly.

Here is how to do this (after you first buy IG from P7):
1) In the page to build the Image Gallery, first create a 'dummy' image gallery, by allowing the code to set up a gallery using 2-3 images of your choice. This lets the P7 base code and CSS to be set up.
2) Update the code as follows. Since I needed to be able to display image, description, and alt tags, I first built an array of structures containing the image information to be displayed.

(first thing: before creating your image gallery and customizing it set a variable rowpernum = the number of tnails per row)

The idea is to determine the number of thumbnails per row, know the ending tnail for the current row (and if it is at the end of the array/recordset -- variable i) and know the actual tnail number you are on (-- variable j)

Since HTML is a 'stateless' environment (meaning that once you go to a new page, the information on the old page isn't saved on its own merit), multi-page forms can be a pain.

You could make either a LOOONNNGGG form that bogs down the user and risks potential session timeouts. Or use a multi-page form, taking care to manage the variables from page to page.

In Coldfusion, this is very easy. And you don't have to even keep up with all the variable names from page to page.

You can either keep up with the values on previous form pages by re-establishing them in the current page form, or you san save them as session variables.

To re-establish them as form variables on your second (and subsequent form pages), add the following to your code after your

In the second part of CFDump Q&D tricks, you can view the entire methods and settings for a CFC, just like you would see in the 'Live Data View' from inside Dreamweaver.

Placing in a CFC outside a function, but inside the tags starts the setup and produces a runtime dump that looks like this:

Clicking on the linked 'component' in that dump will open up the Live data View (note, you'll need administrator privileges to view the methods).

And, in keeping with Adobe's color coding, CFC Dumps are red :).