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.