This one has tripped me up a few times recently, so I thought it best to share. is used (among other things) to assign default values, for example . You can use CFML functions for the default value, but you must provide the expression as a string with #'s delimiting the function call. For example, will not assign the current year to variable yy, rather, yy will contain the string "Year(Now())". While neither intuitive nor consistent, the correct syntax is: .