Why won't my code display anything when my query returns nothing?

The Situation: You have executed a query and then want to display the results of that query using <cfoutput>. All works well -- unless your query doesn't return any rows. Then, nothing displays.

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The Solution: When used with the "query=" parameter, <CFOUTPUT> acts as a loop, iterating through each row returned by the query. If you don't have any rows returned, it will skip over ALL the contents between the <cfoutput></cfoutput> tags so that if the query below returns no rows, the output on the screen will be blank.

<cfquery datasource="aDatasoruce" name="myQ">
  SELECT userID, userName 
  FROM Users
  WHERE fullname = 'Hal Helms'
</cfquery>

<cfoutput query="myQ">
  Your user ID number is #userID#
</cfoutput>

If the query "myQ" did not return at least one row, the code inside the <cfoutput> will never evaluate. To prevent this, you want to test the RECORDCOUNT property of the returned query.

<cfif myQ.recordcount GT 0>
  <cfoutput query="myQ">
  Your user ID number is #userID#
  </cfoutput>
<cfelse>
  Sorry, we couldn't find you in our database.
</cfif>