A reader asks:

I have a CF app that needs the codebase to be able to run on both CF6.1 and CF7.

The function queryNew() can take 2 params in CF7, but not CF6.1.

How can I code round this?

I have tried this, but it doesn't work:

qMyQuery = false;
iCFMajorRelease = listFirst(server.ColdFusion.ProductVersion,",");

if(iCFMajorRelease LT 7){
qMyQuery = queryNew("oneColumn,twoColumn");
} else {
qMyQuery = queryNew("oneColumn,twoColumn","CF_SQL_VARCHAR, CF_SQL_VARCHAR");
}

So as he probably discovered - this code will throw an error when run on ColdFusion 6, even though, in theory, the code doesn't run. The problem is that the CFML is getting compiled (or interpreted, I always forget the right term) and CF6 simply won't like the syntax used in the second cfif branch. I haven't seen this before with functions, but have seen it in the past when trying to use a tag that didn't exist in a previous version. You can see this for yourself in CFMX7 by doing the following:

So how do you get around this? By cfincluding. If you move the code that will only run in CFMX7 to a cfinclude, than CFMX6 will not have a problem. (As long as you don't accidently screw up your cfif conditional.) For an example of this - see how I do charting in Galleon. In order to support BlueDragon, I moved the charting to it's own include file.