CFCatch me if you can

One thing that really annoys me with the cfcatch struct/object (or whatever its pretending to be) is trying to use one of the keys and have it not exist. There have been a few times where I simply want to log cfcatch.detail and it's undefined, throwing a hard error. To me, if it's documented that it is going to be available, it should at least be available as an empty string. I set out this morning looking for a clean way of param'ing some of the keys in cfcatch. Since it doesn't seem to be a true struct, you can't simply do:

<cfparam name="cfcatch.detail" default="" />

That would be way too easy. I found a couple places that suggested using duplicate() to make it act like a struct. I tried that too, and you still can't do a cfparam on it. The key simply won't exist.

After much googling, I came across this post by Isaac Dealey. So using that idea, I created the following function:

<cffunction name="structifyCatch" returntype="struct">
   <cfargument name="catch" type="any" required="true"/>

   <cfset var err = structnew() /> 
   <cfset structappend(err,arguments.catch,true) />

   <cfreturn err />

  </cffunction>

then to implement it, you call the following:

<cftry>
   ... some code ...
   <cfcatch>
     <cfset cfcatch = structifyCatch(cfcatch) />
     <cfparam name="cfcatch.message" default=""/>
     <cfparam name="cfcatch.detail" default=""/>
     <cflog text="There was an error in somecode().
        Message: #cfcatch.message# Detail: #cfcatch.Detail#"
       application="yes">
   </cfcatch>
 </cftry>

Hopefully this will save you a little bit of angst.
There are some interesting behaviors documented here too:
cfcatch was born a struct, then it wasn’t but now it’s back

Blessings,
Terry