ColdFusion 11 DateFormat

Question

I am moving one of our applications from ColdFusion 9.01 to ColdFusion 11 and encountered a situation where I cannot get the date formatted the way I want it using "DateFormat". I read through the docs since things have changed in CF versions, but I honestly can't figure out why this isn't working. It worked beautifully in CF 9. I know it's probably something very easy, but I am just not seeing it.

The query (Oracle DB) provides me a list of the last 30 days and the loop is simply to reformat the date output from "2014-07-01 00:00:00.0" to a more friendly looking display of 01-Jul-2014 except that I cannot get it to format as "dd-mmm-yyyy" it just spits back the original output from the query. I hard coded the date where normally there would be a cfquerparam. Any ideas?

<cfquery name="qryDateArray" datasource="#request.db#">
  select trunc(to_date('07/01/2014', 'mm/dd/yyyy') + 1 - rownum) as ref_date
  from dual connect by rownum <= 30
</cfquery>

<cfloop from="1" to="#qryDateArray.recordcount#" index="j">
  <cfset qryDateArray.ref_date[j] = DateFormat(qryDateArray.ref_date[j], "dd-mmm-yyyy")>
</cfloop>

<cfoutput>
  <cfdump var="#qryDateArray#">
</cfoutput>

Answer 1

I could not test this on CF11 since I do not have it handy. I did verify that your code though returns results as you explained when I ran it on my CF10 environment here. So what you can do is add a column to the query object and define it as a varchar and add your formatted data to that. This in turn dumped out the formatted dates.

<cfquery name="qryDateArray" datasource="#request.db#">
  select trunc(to_date('07/01/2014', 'mm/dd/yyyy') + 1 - rownum) as ref_date
  from dual connect by rownum <= 30
</cfquery>

<cfset aryData  = [] />

<cfloop from="1" to="#qryDateArray.recordcount#" index="j">
  <cfset ArrayAppend(aryData, DateFormat(qryDateArray.ref_date[j], "dd-mmm-yyyy")) />
</cfloop>

<cfset QueryAddColumn(qryDateArray, "STRDATE", "VarChar", aryData) />

<cfoutput>
  <cfdump var="#qryDateArray#">
</cfoutput>

If dependent on the query column names then could use something like Ben's method explained here to do some renaming of the columns: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/357-ask-ben-changing-coldfusion-query-column-names.htm