Development Considerations

During this chapter you learned:

About the different variables that you can use to perform dynamic page processing
How to create a local variable and assign it a value using the CFSET tag
How to reference a ColdFusion local variable for output to a page using the CFOUTPUT tag
How to reference CGI variables
How to create and reference cookie variables

When creating and referencing variables in ColdFusion applications, keep these guidelines in mind:

Variable names should be all one word and begin with a letter.
Variable names can contain only letters, numbers and the underscore.
Variable names should not contain special characters.
ColdFusion variables are not case-sensitive but use a consistent capitalization scheme.
Always use double quotes (") to surround a value when assigning a value to a variable name.
Always surround a variable name with pound signs (#) when referencing the variable to use its current value.
Prefix variable names with variable type to ensure that ColdFusion references the correct variable during processing.

Where to go from here

Move on to the next chapter to learn how to query a database and work with query variables.