User Guide

Using Custom Tags 177

Passing custom tag attributes via CFML structures

You can use the reserved attribute attributecollection to pass attributes to

custom tags.

Attributecollection must reference a structure that contains the

attribute names as the keys and the attribute values as the values. You can freely mix

attributecollection with other attributes when you call a custom tag.

The key-value pairs in the structure specified by

attributecollection get copied

into the called page Attributes scope. This has the same effect as specifying the

attributecollection entries as individual attributes when you call the custom tag.

The custom tag page refers to the attributes passed using

attributecollection the

same way as it does other attributes; for example as Attributes.CustomerName or

Attributes.Department_number.

If the called custom tag uses a

cfassociate tag to save its attributes in the base tag,

the attributes passed via structure are saved as independent attribute values, with no

indication that they were aggregated into a structure by the custom tag’s caller.

Custom tag processing reserves

attributecollection to refer to the structure

holding a collection of custom tag attributes. If

attributecollection does not refer

to such a collection, the ColdFusion generates a Template exception.

The following example uses an attributecollection to pass two of four attributes:

<cf_testtwo a="blab" attributecollection=#zort# foo="16">

If testtwo.cfm contains this CFML:

---custom tag ---<br>

<cfoutput>#attributes.a# #attributes.x# #attributes.y#

#attributes.foo#</cfoutput><br>

--- end custom tag ---

its output is the following statement:

---custom tag ---

blab -X- 12 16

--- end custom tag ---