Welcome to another edition of “Dumbass Code”. Here’s a snippet that’s fun. This bit of code gets a list of product IDs, iterates over them, and if the product ID is greater than zero, and less than 999,999 then it is a “special” type of product and is not counted. In this case a “special” product is a shipping record, or handling, etc… And “not counted” is done by using the listRest ColdFusion method to remove an item. I hadn’t even HEARD of this method till now, and it turns out that it just removes the first element from a list. Okaaaayyy…

<!-- this gets a count of actual products -->
<cfset prodlist = ValueList(getProds.product_id) >
<cfif listlen(prodlist) gt 0>
	<cfloop index="thisprodid" list="#prodlist#">
		<cfif 999999 lt evaluate(thisprodid) or evaluate(thisprodid) lt 0 >
			<cfset prodlist = listrest(prodlist)>
		</cfif>
	</cfloop>
</cfif>

<cfset numprods = listlen(prodlist)>

Kind of odd eh? Seems like a lot of unnecessary processing to just get a count. How about something like this?

<!--- Get a count of actual products --->
<cfset numProducts = 0 />

<cfloop query="getProds">
	<cfif getProds.product_id GT 0 && getProds.product_id LT 999999>
		<cfset numProducts++ />
	</cfif>
</cfloop>

Hmmm.