ColdFusion DirectoryList () - is it possible to get only directories?

Question

I've used <cfdirectory> to get only directories, but I need to do this inside a UDF written in cfscript, so I need to use DirectoryList(). It appears that I need to get everything and then visit the result filtering directories manually. However, there is a filter parameter... can it be used to filter only directories? If so, what would be the filter?

I haven't found an example that will return only directories, and the documentation is not clear on what can be filtered (except for *.txt).

Answer 1

Unfortunately, no. Unlike cfdirectory's type attribute, filters are only applied to the file/directory names. So I do not think it is possible to use filter to find directories only. Keep in mind you can always wrap cfdirectory in a function, then call it from your UDF. That is what the old DirectoryList function at cflib.org does.

the documentation is not clear on what can be filtered (except for *.txt).

You can only search the name. filter supports partial patterns (like find files containing "xxx"), searching by file extensions, or you could apply multiple patterns by using "|":

*test*        // partial pattern. names containing the word "test"
*.xls         // find Excel files
*test*|*.xls  // find names containing "test" OR Excel files

However, since the pattern is only applied to the name, it cannot be used to reliably identify directories.

Answer 2

<cfdirectory action="list"...> (and DirectoryList(path [,recurse] [,listInfo="query"]...)) returns a query object. There's no reason you couldn't do that and then immediately do a query-of-queries filtering on the TYPE column.

Mark Kruger reminds me that I should probably include code:

<cffunction name="DirectoryList2" returntype="query">
  <cfargument name="dirPath" type="string" required="true">
  <cfif directoryExists(arguments.dirPath)>
    <cfdirectory directory="#arguments.dirPath" name="local.DirQuery" action="LIST">
    <cfquery name="local.DirQuery" dbtype="query">
    SELECT * FROM local.DirQuery WHERE TYPE = 'dir'
    </cfquery>
    <cfreturn local.DirQuery>
  <cfelse>
    <cfthrow message="No such directory">
  </cfif>
</cffunction>

Answer 3

Leigh's answer is the correct one (as usual :) but I thought I'd throw in this code as a dead easy work around.

<cfdirectory directory="c:\blah" name="myDirQuery" action="LIST"/>

<Cfquery name="myDirQuery" dbtype="query">
  SELECT * FROM myDirQuery where type = 'dir'
</cfquery>

You could wrap it in your own function pretty easily. This gets you what you want in spite of the limitations of filtering.

Answer 4

I've used this in the past.

var = dirList(directory_path, false, "query")

// var is now a query record
dirArray = []; // create an array

for(i = 1;i LTE var.recordcount; i++){ 
   if(var.type[i] IS "dir") dirArray.append(var.name[i]);
}

Answer 5

It's now possible to filter directories by name, as of CF11. That version enhanced DirectoryList() to add support for the "type" attribute. For example, to search for directory names containing "docs":

CF2018+ (using named parameters)

result = DirectoryList(path="c:\path",filter="*docs*", type="dir");

CF2016 and earlier

result = DirectoryList("c:\path", false, "query", "*docs*", "asc", "dir" );