Blog

Tip of the Week: View Helpers

Brad Wood November 09, 2012

Spread the word

Brad Wood

November 09, 2012

Spread the word


Share your thoughts

 

Have you ever had an ad-hoc helper UDF that you needed in your view?  Perhaps it was too localized to put in your global UDF Library, but you didn't want to clutter up your actual view with the logic.   That's what View Helpers are here for.  
 
They're incredibly simple and driven by good-old conventions.  If you have a view file called products.cfm, simply create a file in the same folder called productsHelper.cfm.  That "helper" file will automatically be included along with your view by the ColdBox framework.  You can place one-off formatting functions, or dynamic JS/CSS in these files, but please-- no business logic.
 
 
P.S. You can create a helper file that will be included for all the views in a folder.  If you had a folder of views called "orders", then you would simply create the file "/views/orders/ordersHelper.cfm".  See the pattern?
 

Add Your Comment

(2)

Nov 09, 2012 13:38:39 UTC

by Dan Fredericks

Is this a feature in 3.0+, or was it added earlier?

Nov 09, 2012 15:20:09 UTC

by Luis Majano

Hi Dan,

this feature was added in 3.0 and beyond

Recent Entries

BoxLang 1.18.0 Released :  Every Cloud, Every Node, Every Agent

BoxLang 1.18.0 Released : Every Cloud, Every Node, Every Agent

Azure joins the serverless family. Scheduled tasks become cluster-safe. And the whole platform gets documentation and skills built for developers and AI agents working side by side.

If you run a technology organization, you are being asked to do three things at once: ship faster, keep the estate you already have running, and make AI part of how your teams work. Most stacks make you choose. BoxLang 1.18 is another step toward not having to.

Luis Majano
Luis Majano
October 02, 2026
ColdBox 8.2 Deep Dive, Part 4 of 5 : AI Routing and Gateways

ColdBox 8.2 Deep Dive, Part 4 of 5 : AI Routing and Gateways

We've been building AI into the core of ColdBox since 8.0, because the applications teams are asked to build have changed. They talk to models, stream answers, expose tools to other AI systems, and increasingly host agents that act on behalf of users. None of that should require bespoke plumbing in every project.

Luis Majano
Luis Majano
October 02, 2026