Freelance Web Development

CFSelect is nice because it can help you write out some code quicker. Just like the rest of ColdFusion. But I never used it because so many times I needed to display two columns in the <option>, such as “#lastName#, #firstName#”.

While working on a site I fell into the same routine. I start typing out CFSelect then grit my teeth when I get to the Display attribute. Being stubborn about it I stumbled upon a nice MySQL function called CONCAT(). Using that one can merge two columns in the query to be output as a single column name. Like so:

<cfquery name="emps" datasource="#application.datasource#">
SELECT
 id, CONCAT(lastname, ', ', firstname) AS fullName
FROM
 employees
ORDER BY
 lastname, firstname
</cfquery>

Then simply use that column name for the display (or elsewhere needed):

<cfselect name="employeeid" query="emps" selected="" value="id" display="fullName"/>

ColdFusion, MySQL, Web Coding cfquery, cfselect, column, concat(), display, option, query, select