One CFHTTP at a time

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to run a process with CFHTTP, and waiting until it's finished, then run another CFHTTP page. Will the second request wait for the first request to complete before running?
If not, how can I do this?
Thanks,
Peter

Answer 1

OK, faced with your dilemma, this is what I would do:
* start from a position that as a general rule, CF code runs sequentially, completing each instruction in series, one at a time: the previous instruction completing before the next starts.  There's no reason to think CFHTTP is any different to any other CF instruction.
* RTFM, to see what that has to say.  The docs for CFHTTP are here: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7f fc.html.  In reading that lot, it strongly hints at what the answer is.
* not being one to trust the CF docs, I would spend 5min knocking some code together to test this.
Indeed those three steps are exactly what I did when prepping for my response to you.
I think you should try to work this out for yourself, rather than asking someone else, but here's the code I used to test:
<!--- test.cfm --->
<cflog file="cfhttpSerialisation" text="Before first call">
<cfhttp method="get" url="http://#CGI.http_host#/path/to/target.cfm">
<cflog file="cfhttpSerialisation" text="After first call">
<cfset sleep(5000)>
<cflog file="cfhttpSerialisation" text="Before second call">
<cfhttp method="get" url="http://#CGI.http_host#/path/to/target.cfm">
<cflog file="cfhttpSerialisation" text="After second call">
<!--- target.cfm --->
<cflog file="cfhttpSerialisation" text="Top of target.cfm">
<cfset sleep(5000)>
<cflog file="cfhttpSerialisation" text="Bottom of target.cfm">
Obviously change /path/to/target.cfm to be correct.
What does running that tell you?
Adam