Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: Working with Required Checkboxes in CFFORM

Working with Required Checkboxes in CFFORM

I just ran across this today. There is a bug with required checkboxes in CFMX7. Basically they don't work. However, you can get around this by simply writing your own validation using onSubmit. This is a known issue so no need to bug MACR about it. This code block demonstrates the bug:

And here is a sample of how to fix it:

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7, 2005 at 3:18 PM. It was filed in the following categories: ColdFusion. It has been viewed 5,925 times and has 9 comments.

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Comment 1 written by David on 7 March 2005, at 5:44 PM

Very odd that this didn't get caught in the beta...In fact, very odd that most of the CFFORM bugs you found weren't fixed pre-release...
Comment 2 written by Raymond Camden on 7 March 2005, at 6:00 PM

Well, from personal experience I can attest to the fact that MACR's QA for CF is very extensive. Obviously they can't catch everything though.
Comment 3 written by Andy Allan on 8 March 2005, at 4:41 AM

Excellent stuff once again Ray.
Comment 4 written by Andrew on 5 April 2005, at 4:31 AM

With checkboxes in CFFORM, the FORM fields contain true/false, not the 'value' if checked as with HTML forms.

Is there a way to get the value returned to the server?
Comment 5 written by John Farrar on 2 October 2005, at 2:35 PM

OK... how about putting checkboxes in CFFormGroup sections? It seems they don't run for me there. I have changed the type to "radio" and the form loads, but if it is changed back to "checkbox" then it doesn't work. ARGHH... you would think I would have found opportunity to find that before they beta ended. Perhaps the guys on the beta could have verified it and then the update would have had a fix for that.
Comment 6 written by John Farrar on 2 October 2005, at 2:44 PM

To be more specific... it's nested... inside a
CFForm "flash"...
CFFormGroup "Tab..." ...
CFFromGroup "page"
CFLoop query=""

And for some reason the flash doesn't come up... never loads but if the type is changed to radio then it works.
Comment 7 written by Raymond Camden on 3 October 2005, at 8:22 AM

When you say they don't show up, you mean they just don't render? Can you post your full code, or a simpler version of it?
Comment 8 written by John Farrar on 3 October 2005, at 3:48 PM

Got the issue figured out... WHEW!!! You cannot have two fields with the same name if they are checkbox type. In HTML you do this and it gives you back a list of all the checked items. Heh... should be labeled "DON'T TRY THIS IN FLASH FORMS". That took care of the issue just fine.
Comment 9 written by Andy Carter on 27 July 2007, at 10:48 PM

Thanks Ray- worked perfectly!