Matt asked a question today and since I actually have gotten some work done today, I figured I'd blog about something besides Ubuntu, Hard Drives, and why I can't wait till I'm 100% Mac-ified. Anyway, here is his question:
I have a best practices question: is it bad practice to call a custom tag from a CFC, also is it bad practice to have HTML in a CFC.
First - check out the CFC Guide I have here:
I find that folks tend to miss my Guides pod to the right so I thought I'd point it out.
Is it bad practice to call a custom tag from a CFC? Not at all. You can call other CFC methods, other CFCs, custom tags, web services, etc. You may want to task if it makes sense to move that custom tag's logic into a CFC method however.
Your second question could be read two ways:
Is it ok to return HTML from a CFC method?
and...
Is it ok to have HTML in a CFC method?
The second version matches what you said - but I believe you meant the first version. In general folks almost never do this. The idea is - let the CFC handle logic (getProducts) and let you front end handle display.
That being said - I've done the second way (html in a CFC) in the past when I need to send formatted emails from a CFC, like for Ligthouse Pro's email reports. It would be possible to pass in a template of some sort, but frankly that seems like too much trouble.