A reader asks:

Ray, what's a good way to exclude pages from having Application.cfm/.cfc applied to them? Say, for a form that asks the user for an e-mail address if they forgot their password, or a form to register for a site?

So you can't tell ColdFusion to ignore an Application.cfm/cfc file. You could put your file in a subfolder and then use an empty Application.cfc/cfm. However, I'm guessing you probably don't want to do that. For example - the forgot password functionality will probably require things from your Application.cfc/cfm file. I'm also guessing that you applying security to your site that works something like this pseudo-code:

This code basically says, if you aren't logged in, force login.cfm to load and stop everything else. This works fine - but if you want a register or "Forgot Password" type page, how do you handle it?

One way around it is to do it all in one file. That's what I do for Galleon. Galleon doesn't force you to login to browse, but you will notice on the login page that we support both logging in, registering, and retrieving a lost password. This works for Galleon since the registration is somewhat simple.

Another possibility is to modify your security a bit. Instead of - "Always go to login.cfm if not logged in", your logic could be "Always go to login.cfm if not logged in unless you are at register.cfm". This is a bit of a hack I suppose, but is safe since you are still blocking access to everything except one page.

To make that a bit more general - let's say you didn't want onRequestStart to do anything for a set of files. You could simply put them in a sub folder - add an Application.cfc that extends the parent, and write a blank onRequestStart.

As always - I open it up for alternatives. (Although I wish smart people would stop adding comments that are ten times better than mine. What's wrong with you people?? :)