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ColdFusion 2021 Query of Queries Bug

September 9, 2022

There seems to be a potential bug in ColdFusion 2021 Query of Queries.

Today I ran into this error:

Index 5 out of bounds for length 5 null

The index bounds will change based on the number of columns in the query as explained below.

This error was being thrown in a very basic QoQ:

<cfquery name="qUser" dbtype="query">
SELECT	*
FROM	qUsers
WHERE	User_ID = <cfqueryparam value="#user_id#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_numeric">
</cfquery>

While Investigating the source for the original qUsers query I noticed two columns with the same name:

Looking a little deeper I found that the original qUsers query was being ordered via a QoQ prior to the QoQ throwing the error:

<cfquery name="qUsers" dbtype="query">
SELECT	  *
FROM	  qUsers
ORDER BY  payroll_name
</cfquery>

So essentially a query of a query of a query.

The problem appears to be that ColdFusion is case-sensitive and for some reason adds the ORDER BY column to the query resulting in a query that has two columns with the same name.

The solution was to change the ordering QoQ to match the case of the original qUsers query:

<cfquery name="qUsers" dbtype="query">
SELECT	  *
FROM	  qUsers
ORDER BY  PAYROLL_NAME
</cfquery>