Every time the framework renders a view, it will try to leverage the default layout which is located in layouts/Main.cfm by convention. This is an HTML file that gives format to your output and contains the location of where the view you want should be rendered.

Layout Code

This location is identified by the following code:

<div id="maincontent">
#renderView()#
</div>

The call to the renderView() method with no arguments tells the framework to render the view that was set using event.setView(). This is called a rendering region. You can use as many rendering regions within layouts or even within views themselves.

Creating A Layout

Let's create a new simple layout with two rendering regions. Open up CommandBox and issue the following commands:

# Create a Funky layout
coldbox create layout name="Funky"
​
# Create a footer
coldbox create view name="main/footer"

Open the layouts/Funky.cfm layout and let's modify it a bit by adding the footer view as a rendering region.

<h1>funky Layout</h1>
<cfoutput>#renderView()#</cfoutput>
​
<hr>
<cfoutput>#renderView( "main/footer" )#</cfoutput>

Using The Layout

Now, let's open the handler we created before called handlers/hello.cfc and add some code to use our new layout explicitly via adding a layout argument to our setView() call.

function index( event, rc, prc ){
    // param an incoming variable.
    event.paramValue( "name", "nobody" );
    // set a private variable
    prc.when = dateFormat( now(), "full" );
​
    // set the view to render with our new layout
    event.setView( view="hello/index", layout="Funky" );
}

Go execute the event now: http://localhost:{port}/hello/index and you will see the view rendered with the words funky layout and footer view at the bottom. Eureka, you have now created a layout.