It's a type of query in Microsoft SQL Server that will return formatted XML data to you as a string basically. There are a host of options for FOR XML queries and I'm not going to get into that at all for this tutorial. Google 'FOR XML RAW AUTO EXPLICIT' for some good information.

Now, this would be much easier if Cold Fusion would allow you to refer to columns as an ordinal, but it doesn't as far as I know. You can acquire the column name and use that to get your column though. That would be great except that FOR XML queries use a generated column name which always contains a '-' and Cold Fusion doesn't like '-' characters in it's column names.

What to do, oh what to do.

Fear not! Query of Queries to the rescue. It's fairly self explanitory, but i'll explain a little. First we execute a FOR XML query to get a stream of XML data. Then we do a select from that where 0=1 so we don't get any results. In queries using UNION ALL the first result set will have the column names so we rename the column (there's only one) to 'xml' (can be anything that Cold Fusion can read) by performing a select from the original query where 0=1 so we don't get any results. Then we turn off debugging, switch the content type, and output the xml string.

<!--
    Name: forxml.cfm
    author: Roy Ashbrook
    email: royashbrook@yahoo.com 
    description:
    this script demonstrates how to dump for xml query data to the screen as xml 
-->

<cfquery name="bad" datasource="myDSN">
    SELECT *
    FROM SOMETABLE FOR XML RAW
</cfquery>

<cfquery dbtype="query" name="good">
    select 'xml' as xmlstring from bad where 0=1
    union all
    select * from bad
</cfquery>

<cfsetting showDebugOutput="No">
<cfcontent type="text/xml">
<cfoutput query="good">
   #xmlstring#
</cfoutput>