Pausing your CFMX code

Folks have often wanted to pause their CFcode, particularly when wanting to simulate some sort of long-running task. Usually they use a CFLOOP, but now that CMX is built upon Java, there is a better and less resource intensive way. Java has a "sleep" method in the java.lang.Thread object. You can get a wait by doing the equivalent:

<cfobject type="JAVA" name="obj" class="java.lang.Thread" action="CREATE">

<cfset obj.sleep(10000)>

This will pause 10 seconds.

CF_SLEEP

To make it even easier, I've created a custom tag to handle this, called cf_sleep. It's available both at the DevExchange and via my site. You would use it in the form:

<cf_sleep seconds="nn">

SLEEP UDF

It's also available as a UDF, in which you might use it in the form:

<cfinclude template="sleep_udf.cfm">
<cfset tmp=sleep(2)>

Believe it or not, this approach works in CF5 (and 4.5) as well as MX, since the ability to call Java objects was introduced back then.