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It would seem obvious that the move action for cffile should give you the option to create a unique filename if the destination directory already contains a file with the same name. It would seem. Yet ColdFusion does not.
So here is a function I put together for a project a while back to do this for me.
<cffunction name="moveFile" access="private" output="false" returntype="string"
hint="Moves a file to a final location while preventing name conflicts. Returns the unique filename">
<cfargument name="sourceFilePath" required="true" type="string" hint="Path to the existing file">
<cfargument name="destinationDirectory" required="true" type="string" hint="Path to the destination directory">
<!--- Extract the filename from the source path --->
<cfset var filename = getFileFromPath(arguments.sourceFilePath)>
<cfset var counter = 1>
<cfset var uniqueFileName = "">
<cfset var destinationFilePath = "">
<!--- Create an exclusive lock specific to the target directory --->
<cflock type="exclusive" timeout="30" name="#destinationDirectory#">
<!--- If a file with the same name already exists at the destination --->
<cfif fileExists(destinationDirectory & "/" & filename)>
<!--- Loop up to 100 times to try create a unique filename --->
<cfloop condition="counter LT 100">
<cfset destinationFilePath = destinationDirectory & "/" & counter & "_" & filename>
<cfif fileExists(destinationFilePath)>
<cfset counter++>
<cfelse>
<cfset uniqueFileName = counter & "_" & filename>
<cfbreak/>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<!--- Filename does not already exist at the destination --->
<cfelse>
<cfset uniqueFileName = filename>
<cfset destinationFilePath = folder & "/" & filename>
</cfif>
<!--- Provided the filename is not already in use at the destination or a unique filename was generated we can perform the move --->
<cfif len(trim(uniqueFileName))>
<cffile action="move" source="#sourceFilePath#" destination="#destinationFilePath#">
<cfelse>
<cfthrow message="Unable to move the file and create a unique filename at the destination">
</cfif>
</cflock>
<cfreturn uniqueFileName>
</cffunction>
Note: While not strictly necessary the cflock is an added guarantee that this code does not encounter a race condition when moving files into a specific directory.
Reader Comments
Wednesday, March 25, 2015 at 11:32:25 AM Coordinated Universal Time
Thanks for this! I modified your code slightly to copy a file and to add the incremented number/underscore to the end of the filename (eg "myfile_1.pdf"). The code posted has an error with the "folder" variable not being defined - I changed this variable to "destinationDirectory".
Very nice work!