Add a little CFCONTINUE to your looping

Loops are the building blocks of what makes a language. They allow you to quickly iterate over data, performing various operations dependent on state. CFML has always had strong support for this construct with CFLOOP, allowing you to pretty much iterate over nearly any type of data structure you care to throw at it.

CFML has also supported the notion of breaking out of a loop. Say you don't want to carry on going around your loop, you can simply CFBREAK out of it and execution is resumed from the end of the CFLOOP tag.

Sometimes that isn't enough and this is where CFML lets the developer down, but OpenBD picks them back up.

What if you want to simply stop the current iteration and move onto the next element in the loop. Most languages have this ability, the notion to say, "continue;" and move onto the next one.

The alternative of course is to write your loop in such a way that you have lots of CFIF statements, all nesting and quickly before you know it, you can get yourself into quite a bit of a nested logic hell.

<cfloop index="x" from="1" to="10">
 
  <cfif x eq 1>
    First Element
    <cfcontinue>
  </cfif>
 
 Now we can do something with elements 2-10
</cfloop>

BlueDragon introduced the CFCONTINUE tag many years ago, which naturally carried on through to OpenBD and is part of the core distribution ready for use. CFCONTINUE operates exactly like it does in any other language that fully supports looping. You can insert it inside your loop anywhere, and it will stop the execution of the current iteration and move onto the next element in the loop.

This proves to be a much more efficient and cleaner way of managing your data looping and has the added benefit of making your code easier to write and read.

Try it today - clean up your loops.