A friend wrote to me this morning with an interesting problem. He recently moved his site (hosted at CrystalTech) from ColdFusion 7 to ColdFusion 8. Then he began to get NPEs (Null Pointer Exceptions) in regards to cfquery tags. He would get these about once per 1-2k hits.

But get this - CystalTech recommended adding a blank onRequest:

<cffunction name = "onRequest" access = "public" returnType = "boolean" output="true">

<cfargument name = "thePage" type = "string" required = "true">

<cfinclude template="#arguments.thePage#">

<cfreturn true />

</cffunction>

And it worked! He no longer got the NPE error. Now I don't know about you - but I can't imagine any reason why this change would make his error go away. Can anyone else think of a reason why it would help?

As for the NPE in general - one thing I've asked him if is the cfquery was in a CFC and he possibly forgot to var scope. Not that I think it would make a NPE, but the lack of var scoping is something that could lead to random errors like he observed.