Rethrow in cfscript?

March 9, 2004 coldfusion

(This post is more than 2 years old.)

ColdFusion MX added try/catch to the CFSCRIPT, a welcome addition, but you can't throw an exception, or rethrow. Doing a throw is quite easy if you write a UDF for it. However, rethrow is not so easy. You may think:

However, this will cause a syntax error since rethrow must be contained inside a cfcatch block. For the heck of it, I tried the following:

<cffunction name="rethrow">
   <cftry>
      <cfcatch>
      <cfrethrow>
      </cfcatch>
   </cftry>
</cffunction>

<cftry>
   <cfscript>
      try {
         throw("my type","my ex");
         } catch(Exception e) {
            rethrow();
         }

   </cfscript>
   <cfcatch>
      <cfoutput>exception thrown</cfoutput>
      <cfdump var="#cfcatch#">
   </cfcatch>
</cftry>

What surprised me is that my rethrow UDF noticed an error had occured and automatically entered the cfcatch block.

This had one problem though. I could call rethrow outside of cfcatch. It wouldn't throw an exception, it would simply do nothing. I modified the UDF like so:

You will only get to the end of the UDF when you haven't called rethrow() in a catch block.

p.s. Normally I'd add returnType/output/etc to my code. Don't forget to do so if you actually use the UDFs.

p.s.s. And of course, I'd much prefer it if MACR would simply add throw/rethrow to cfscript. :)