The cftree tag lets you force a user to select an item from the tree control by setting the required attribute to Yes. With or without the required attribute, ColdFusion passes two form variables to the application page specified in the cfform action attribute:

• Form.treename.path Returns the complete path of the user selection, in the form: [root]\node1\node2\node_n\value
• Form.treename.node Returns the node of the user selection.

To return the root part of the path, set the completepath attribute of the cftree tag to Yes; otherwise, the path value starts with the first node. If you specify a root name for a tree item using the queryasroot tag, that value is returned as the root. If you do not specify a root name, ColdFusion returns the query name as the root. If there is no query name, ColdFusion returns the tree name as the root.

In the previous example, if the user selects the name "John Allen" in the tree, ColdFusion returns the following form variables:

Form.tree1.path = 3\John Allen
Form.tree1.node = John Allen

The deptquery root does not appear in the path, because the cftree tag does not specify completePath="Yes". You can specify the character used to delimit each element of the path form variable in the cftree delimiter attribute. The default is a backslash character (\).