Email looping

Heya Ian,

You are of course right, and I would personally go down your route, but in terms of just getting it to work, the CFMAIL tag is enough.

But yes, as you said, validation may be very important (and I would always recommend it), especially as the email may not be a valid email (highly likely if user entered), and I'm not sure what CFMAIL would do with this - probably error. So sure, I would do something like:

<cfloop query="something">
<cfif isValid(something.email,"email")>
<cfmail ...>email here</cfmail>
<cfelse>
Invalid user email.
</cfif>
</cfloop>

It's not that any one version was wrong, we were all right. But it's nice to see everyones points on this.

Good times! :)
Mikey.

Dan Bracuk wrote:
> It won't work because cfmail is effectively the same as cfoutput. Your code
> will crash because of nested cfoutputs.

Actually Dan is incorrect. Your original code would have worked,
because you can nest query loops with the <cfloop...> tags. You can't
nest <cfoutput query=""> loops.

I would have written it this way personally.

<cfoutput>
<cfloop query="">
</cfloop>
</cfoutput>

There is a small amount of overhead for ColdFusion to open and close
<cfoutput...> blocks. So as a rule of thumb, I minimize that when possible.

But Dan is correct that the <cfmail...> tag has a parameter to handle
query record sets that will handle the looping itself. Thus, the above
code may be unnecessary. But sometimes it is still relevant in that
this allows other processing or checking of the data before the email is
generated.

Finally the <cfoutput> may also be unnecessary as the <cfmail...> tag
will server the same purpose to render any variables inside the
<cfmail...>...</cfmail> block. So you would only need the surrounding
<cfoutput>...</cfoutput> block, if you wanted to output other content,
outside of the email body being generated.

It won't work because cfmail is effectively the same as cfoutput. Your code will crash because of nested cfoutputs.

The best way to do it is with one of the attributes of the cfmail tag. They are all in the cfml reference manual. If you don't have one, the internet does.