User Guide

622 Chapter 3: ColdFusion Functions
Note: Use the This scope to access component metadata inside the CFC. The This scope is available
at runtime in the component body and in the CFC methods. It is used to read and write variables that
are present during the life of the component.
For more information, see “Using introspection to get information about components” in
Chapter 10, “Building and Using ColdFusion Components,” in ColdFusion MX Developer’s
Guide.
Example
The following example uses the cfdump tag to display metadata for the utilities CFC that is used
by the ColdFusion component browser. It also displays the names and data types of the fields in
the cfdocexamples database Employees table.
<!--- Create an instance of the Component Explorer utilities CFC.
and get its metadata --->
<cfscript>
componentutils = createObject("component", "cfide.componentutils.utils");
utilmetadata = getMetaData(componentutils);
</cfscript>
<h4>Metadata for the CFC component utilities</h4>
<cfdump var="#utilmetadata#">
<!--- use GetMetadata to get the names and data types of the fields in the
cfdocexamples Employees table --->
Parameter or Property A structure containing the following fields:
default Value of the
cfargument or cfproperty tag default attribute, if
any.
displayname Value of the
cfargument or cfproperty tag displayname
attribute, if any.
hint Value of the
cfargument or cfproperty tag hint attribute, if
any.
name Function parameter or CFC propery name.
required Value of the
cfargument or cfproperty tag required attribute, if
any.
type Value of the
cfargument or cfproperty tag type attribute, if
any.
userMetadata User-specified attributes in the
argument tag.
Query An array of structures containing the following elements:
IsCaseSensitive Boolean value indicating whether character data must be case
correct.
Name The column name.
TypeName The SQL data type (Omitted if the query object is created with
QueryNew without specifying types.)
Object Field Description