Question

I have a couple of places that have some code like this:

<cfinvoke component="#application.path#cfc/eval_faculty" method="getPresentations" returnvariable="presentations">
    <cfinvokeargument name="id" value="#eval_id#">
    <cfinvokeargument name="evalYear" value="#eval_semester#">
    <cfinvokeargument name="department" value="#general.dept#">
</cfinvoke>

<cfset prescheck = 0>
<cfloop query="presentations">
    <cfif local eq "" and regional eq "" and national eq "" and international eq "">
        <cfset prescheck = prescheck+1>
    </cfif>
</cfloop>

I get this error:

Complex object types cannot be converted to simple values.

None of these values in the cfif statement is a complex object.

This worked fine in ColdFusion 8. We just upgraded to ColdFusion 9…

The error occurs on the line with <cfif local eq "" ... >

Any ideas?

Answer 1

<cfif local eq ""

It could be that LOCAL is now a system scope in CF9, like FORM, URL, etecetera. So CF complains when you try to perform a string comparison on it because it is a structure. If LOCAL represents a simple variable in your old code, try using a different variable name.

Update: From the comments, if LOCAL is the name of a column in your query, you could either use a sql alias to give it another name:

  SELECT Local AS LocalAlias FROM Table

… or use a fully qualified variable name:

   <cfif queryName.local ...>