cfproperty – I ask you: why not default correctly?

When CF 9 arrived, one significant change was the elevation of the cfproperty tag thanks to all the new ORM goodness. What this meant was the arrivial of synthesised getter and setters and the fact that cfproperty values were now stored in the variables scope.

Overall this means very succinct code based around object properties. Except for one very annoying bug, that is.

I speak of the default attribute on the cfproperty tag.

If I write the following simple component:

<cfcomponent output="false" accessors="true">

	 <cfproperty name="foo" default="" />

	 <cffunction name="init" access="public" returntype="void" output="false"> 
	 	<cfset setFoo("bar") />
	 </cffunction>
	 
	 
	 <cffunction name="dumpVariablesScope" access="public" returntype="void" output="true"> 
	 	
	 	<cfdump var="#VARIABLES#" label="variables scope" />
	 
	 </cffunction>

</cfcomponent> 	

Now if I create the object and call dumpVariablesScope() I get the following output:

You can see that the foo property, despite having a default set to “” is not a first class citizen in the variables scope. Why not?! It is mentioned in the this.properties – not the same thing of course.

So I actually need to set that foo property in some way first. For example in the init() we could add this:

...
	 <cffunction name="init" access="public" returntype="void" output="false"> 
	 	<cfset setFoo("bar") />
	 </cffunction>
...

Or even this:

...
	 <cffunction name="init" access="public" returntype="void" output="false"> 
	 	<cfset variables.foo = "bar" />
	 </cffunction>
...

Then you see foo as it should be: a first class citizen in the variables scope:

I wish I didn’t have to write silly blog posts about this, I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but it seems very counter-intuitive to me.