Use for Debugging

was introduced to ColdFusion in version 5, but apparently there are many CFers who have yet to discover this invaluable tag. In the past week I received three different code help e-mail requests, all of which I answered with suggestions, all of which included the use of in test code, and all of which were met with responses to the effect of "huh, I've never used before.

So, is an all-purpose data display tool. Give it a simple variable and it'll display it. But can do more than just display simple variables, it can render entire queries, arrays, structures, XML document objects, instantiated ColdFusion Components, Java objects, and any combination of the above (an array of structures containing an array of queries, for example). You can even entire scopes (like SESSION, or VARIABLES) because those are actually structures.

In other words, can display most of what standard debug output can, and a whole lot more too. In fact, come to think of it, I have not used standard debug output in a long time, nowadays I rely mostly on .

If you have yet to use this remarkable tag, do so, quickly. But one point to keep in mind, expects expressions, not names of variables. So, if you the word VARIABLES will be displayed, to dump all variables you'd need .