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cflogin

Last update:
May 18, 2026

Description

A container for user login and authentication code. ColdFusion runs the code in this tag if a user is not already logged in. You put code in the tag that authenticates the user and identifies the user with a set of roles. Used with cfloginuser tag.

Category

Syntax

<cflogin 
applicationToken = "token" 
cookieDomain = "domain" 
idletimeout = "value"
allowconcurrent = "true|false"
usebasicauth = "true|false"> 
... 
<cfloginuser 
name = "name" 
password = "password" 
roles = "roles"> 
</cflogin>

See also

History

ColdFusion 11: Added 2 new attributes allowconcurrent and usebasicauth.
ColdFusion 8: The applicationtoken attribute lets you specify a unique application identifier for each application, or the same value for multiple applications.ColdFusion MX 6.1: Changed behavior: the cflogin variable exists when ColdFusion receives a request with NTLM or Digest (HTTP Negotiated header) authentication information.ColdFusion MX: Added this tag.

Attributes

Attribute
Req/Opt
Default
Description
applicationtoken
Optional
The current application name
The login that applies to the application. To let users log in to only one application, specify a unique value for that application. To let users log in to multiple applications, specify the same value for those applications. If you do not set a value for the applicationtoken attribute, the default value is CFAUTHORIZATION_applicationname.
cookiedomain
Optional
Domain of the cookie that is used to mark a user as logged in. Use this attribute to enable a user login cookie to work with multiple clustered servers in the same domain.
idletimeout
Optional
1800
Time interval, in seconds, after which ColdFusion logs off the user.
allowconcurrentOptionaltrue
If concurrent login sessions should be allowed.
usebasicauthOptionaltrue
If basic authentication should be used to validate the login.

Usage

The body of this tag executes only if there is no logged-in user. When using application-based security, you put code in the body of the cflogin tag to check the user-provided ID and password against a data source, LDAP directory, or other repository of login identification. The body must include a cfloginuser tag to establish the authenticated user's identity in ColdFusion.

You control the data source and are responsible for coding the SQL within the cflogin tag; make sure that the associated database has user, password, and role information.

The cflogin tag has a built-in cflogin structure that contains two variables, cflogin.name and cflogin.password, if the page is executing in response to any of the following:
  • Submission of a form that contains input fields with the names j_username and j_password.
  • A request that uses HTTP Basic authentication and, therefore, includes an Authorization header with the user name and password.
  • A request that uses NTLM or Digest authentication. In this case, the username and password are hashed using a one-way algorithm in the Authorization header; ColdFusion gets the username from the web server and sets the cflogin.password value to the empty string. You can use these values in the cflogin tag body to authenticate the user, and, in the cfloginuser tag, to log the user in. The structure is only available in the cflogin tag body.

Example

The following example shows a simple authentication. This code is typically in the Application.cfc onRequestStart method or in the application.cfm page.
<cflogin> 
<cfif NOT IsDefined("cflogin")> 
<cfinclude template="loginform.cfm"> 
<cfabort> 
<cfelse> 
<cfif cflogin.name eq "admin"> 
<cfset roles = "user,admin"> 
<cfelse> 
<cfset roles = "user"> 
</cfif> 
<cfloginuser name = "#cflogin.name#" password = "#cflogin.password#" 
roles = "#roles#"/> 
</cfif> 
</cflogin>
The following view-only example checks the user ID and password against a data source:
<cfquery name="qSecurity" 
datasource="UserRolesDb"> 
SELECT Roles FROM SecurityRoles 
WHERE username=<cfqueryparam value='#cflogin.name#' CFSQLTYPE="CF_SQL_VARCHAR" 
AND password=<cfqueryparam value='#cflogin.password#' CFSQLTYPE='CF_SQL_VARCHAR' 
</cfquery> 

<cfif qSecurity.recordcount gt 0> 
<cfloginuser name = "#cflogin.name#" 
password = "#cflogin.password#" 
roles = "#trim(qSecurity.Roles)#" > 
</cfif>

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