ColdFusion can perform operations on date and time values. Date-time values identify a date and time in the range 100 AD to 9999 AD. Although you can specify just a date or a time, ColdFusion uses one data type representation, called a date-time object, for date, time, and date and time values.

ColdFusion provides many functions to create and manipulate date-time values and to return all or part of the value in several different formats.

You can enter date and time values directly in a cfset tag with a constant, as follows:

<cfset myDate = "October 30, 2001">

When you do this, ColdFusion stores the information as a string. If you use a date-time function, ColdFusion stores the value as a date-time object, which is a separate simple data type. When possible, use date-time functions such as CreateDate and CreateTime to specify dates and times, because these functions can prevent you from specifying the date or time in an invalid format and they create a date-time object immediately.