A quick note on ColdFusion configuration, XML files, and dependability

There is a wonderful set of files packaged with ColdFusion that you may or may not be aware of. Heck, you may have never even poked behind the scenes of what makes ColdFusion tick before but, if you haven't, you really should because these files _are_ important and they control a whole lot of settings you use on a day-to-day basis. I'm going to briefly cover what each file is, what it controls, and how you can use these files to do a number of things, from ensuring disaster recover-ability, to environment specific deployments.

So what files are these?

Retrieving a paginated HQL query with total records included

This is going to be more of quick hit post. Many of us have written paginated queries before. (Don't need to pull back the whole database when you only need the first 100 records right ^__^ ) and, as many have discovered, ormExecuteQuery() supports the 'maxrecords' and 'offset' parameters.

This was brought up at work a few days ago (I have a feeling a lot of entries are going to start this way...) where a coworker was trying to write a query that was going to be paginated, but wanted to include the total number of records in the entire result set so that they could display it on the page. (i.e. Records 1-20 of 375, etc...)

The issue is this: HQL doesn't support COUNT() on multiple columns. So how do we get the value?