Exceptions include any event that disrupts the normal flow of instructions in a ColdFusion page, such as failed database operations, missing include files, or developer-specified events. Ordinarily, when ColdFusion encounters an exception, it stops processing and displays an error message, or an error page specified by a cferror tag or the Site-wide Error Handler option on the Settings page in the Administrator. However, you can use the ColdFusion exception handling tags to catch and process runtime exceptions directly in ColdFusion pages.

This ability to handle exceptions directly in your application pages enables your application to do the following:

• Respond appropriately to specific errors within the context of the current application page
• Recover from errors whenever possible.