Broken content type

13 July 2007 00:07 (EST)

Iâ€™ve got an odd problem with CFMX server (at least version 7.0.1) recently â€” it looks like DateFormat function reset content type to text/html despite use of cfcontent tag for defining different mime type before.

See few short examples below:

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true">

<cfcontent type="application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8">

<cfoutput><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<date>#dateformat(now())#</date>
</cfoutput>

Suddenly script returns text/html mime type instead of application/rss+xml as well as code below:

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true">

<cfcontent type="application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8">
<cfset xmldate = dateformat(now()) />

<cfoutput><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<date>#xmldate#</date>
</cfoutput>

But following script does return correct (application/rss+xml) mime type:

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true">

<cfset xmldate = dateformat(now()) />
<cfcontent type="application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8">

<cfoutput><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<date>#xmldate#</date>
</cfoutput>

Same happens with TimeFormat function. Is there anything specific around these functions? Can someone test last two examples with their CF instances?

Discussion (2 comments)

Justin:

13 July 2007 01:53 (EST)

I found that in the second example, if I removed the charset from the content type the correct mime type was returned.

In the third example, I was returned text/html until I set showdebugoutput="false" in the <cfsetting> tag, but oddly enough that setting didn't make a difference in the 2nd example.

	Dmitry Yakhnov:	13 July 2007 11:12 (EST)
	Thanks for your reply, at least people will be aware of this "feature"
	reply

	Justin:	14 July 2007 05:22 (EST)
	Have you thought about submitting it as a bug? FYI- I am using version 7 also.
	reply

	Dmitry Yakhnov:	15 July 2007 18:52 (EST)
	Will do so a bit later
	reply

tracylogan.com:

6 September 2007 06:06 (EST)

Thanks for the confirmation on this; we'd found much the same thing (after *way* too long!) while attempting to write a text/xml (and UTF-8) document that could include a call to dateformat()/timeformat(). When that call was made, the text/xml content type magically became text/html.

There is good news; after a bit of testing, this bug does appear to be fixed in CF8.

Nick Johns:

20 November 2008 03:36 (EST)

I've also had this problem, but I worked out a workaround.

Rather than never using the dateformat & timeformat functions after a cfcontent call (which would have made things very difficult), I found that by using a
<cfflush> straight after the cfcontent tag, dateformat & timeformat can no longer change the content type.

Hope this helps for those that can't upgrade to CF8 yet!