Coding Standards

Scope - This documents the coding standards followed by us for development and maintenance project for the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). This document is intended to be a living document and It serves as the vehicle for deriving and documenting agreed to practices by all of our engineers involved in writing CFML for Internet and Intranet websites.

Intended Audience - This document is intended for website developers(software engineers) at Providio and interfacing agencies. It is intended for all our engineers with an intention to develop industry best practices in the development of content for all our clients / projects handled on CFML.

ColdFusion Markup Language Coding Standards - This section outlines the standard guidelines to be followed when using CFML. The standards are divided up into separate tables according to functional category.

Directory/File Naming Conventions - ColdFusion tags and variables as processed within the ColdFusion environment are not case sensitive. Unlike the Windows operating system, which is not case sensitive, the LINUX operation system is case sensitive. This means that directory and filenames are case sensitive in LINUX. To reduce the chance of error when transferring files between the PC and LINUX platforms or from windows to LINUX later when decided by our clients, we maintain a consistency in directory and file naming, spaces are avoided in filenames since spaces cause problems in some backup software.

Guideline	Example	Rationale
File names: Use lowercase letters only. Do not use spaces or underscores.	File name: cfexample.cfm	Standardization for consistency in maintaining correct filenames in case sensitive environments.

Variable/Form Field Naming Conventions -

When naming ColdFusion variables and form fields, the following guidelines are noted and practiced:
" Descriptive names are used for field names and variables and minimize usage of abbreviations. This makes other read our code with ease, and also helps our engineers who developed it, when visited later months after, to remember how it works yourself.
" Care is also taken not to have queries and variables with the same name in the same ColdFusion application page.

Guideline	Example	Rationale
Variables: Begin with a lowercase letter, followed by letters, numbers, or underscores. Capitalize words following initial word. No spaces or special characters.	Variables name: userName_1	File name and capitalization standardization for consistency.

ColdFusion Custom Tag documentation - Since during the development of a module / Application its common that we develop as many as Custom tags both CFML and CFX, we document each file, since this custom tag would be used by many different developers and applications. Each file shall contain the following information. Comments shall be used liberally to explain the code.

• Description of what the CFX does
• Usage notes
• List of attributes, names, descriptions, and whether or not they are required
• Example usage code
• List of changes this Tag makes to the CALLER template.
• Authors name and email address
• Creation date
• Chronological dates indicating what was changed, by who, and what was changed in the file

We code Custom Tags so they may be reused as much as possible which is accomplished by making them as generic as possible. To accomplish this again we allow the Custom Tag to include as many attributes and defaults as possible and Keep hardcoding of variables to a minimum.