Because the Application.cfc file in the root of your Wheels site just includes the wheels/functions.cfm file, which in turn includes a lot of framework specific code, you may wonder what the best way is to use CFML's onApplicationStart, onRequestStart and similar functions...

While it's perfectly possible to add your code directly to the wheels/functions.cfm file, we certainly don't recommend it. If you add code in there, you both increase the risk of accidentally modifying how the framework functions, and you also make it a lot harder to upgrade to future versions of Wheels.

Use the events Folder for Standard CFML Events

The general recommendation is to never touch any files in the wheels folder. OK, with that little warning out of the way, how does one go about using the CFML events?

The answer is to use the events folder. There is a file in there for every single event that CFML triggers. So if you want some code executed on application start for example, just place your code in onapplicationstart.cfm, and Wheels will run it when your application starts.

Wheels Includes Some Extra Bonus Events

If you look closely in the events folder, you will also notice that there are some custom files in there that do not match up with standard CFML events. The onmaintenance.cfm file is one example. Let's have a closer look at these.

On Maintenance

The onmaintenance.cfm file is included when Wheels is set to maintenance mode. After the file is included, cfabort is called by Wheels so no other code runs in this mode.

On Error

You can place a generic error message in the onerror.cfm file to be displayed to the users whenever your site throws an error. When this page is shown a HTTP status code of 500 (Internal Server Error) will also be sent.

If you need to access the error information here (for logging purposes, for example) it is available at arguments.exception.

On Missing Template

The onmissingtemplate.cfm file works in a similar way as the error file above, but it gets called when a controller or action in your application could not be found. When this page is shown a HTTP status code of 404 (Not Found) will also be sent.

Adding Functions

Sometimes it's useful to add functions right in the Application.cfc file to make them available to all templates. To achieve the same thing in Wheels you can place your functions in events/functions.cfm.

Application Settings

Again, because there is no Application.cfc file for you to work with in Wheels, you have to find a suitable place to set application settings such as SessionTimeout, ScriptProtect, SetClientCookies, and so on. These are usually set in the constructor area of an Application.cfc file. We recommend that you set them in the events/onapplicationstart.cfm file instead.