Vincent Collins’ Weblog

It’s probably old news to folks who have been using Query of Query a lot but now with CFFEED, some developers may be using the query of query feature for the first time.

CFFEED when converting to a query has no knowledge of data type for any given column. In the example below, google’s news feed returns a column (PUBLISHEDDATE) that is treated as a string but is in fact a date. Thus when you try to sort by PUBLISHEDDATE, it doesn’t work the way you would expect. By using the cast() function, I’m able to on the fly sort the query as a date.

<!--- set feed --->
<cfset feed = "http://news.google.com/?output=rss">
<!--- grab feed --->
<cffeed action="read" source="#feed#" query="rss" userAgent="Mozilla/4.0" properties="rssProperties">
<!---  Sort query by date after casting it as a date --->
<cfquery dbtype="query" name="rss">
SELECT
Title, CAST(PUBLISHEDDATE as date) as publisheddate, rsslink, content
FROM
RSS
ORDER BY
publisheddate desc
</cfquery>