Third-Party API Error Handling in ColdFusion: Retry Logic, Circuit Breakers, and Logging

When ColdFusion calls a third-party API with cfhttp, robust error handling rests on four things. First, inspect the response properly — cfhttp returns a result struct with statusCode, fileContent, errorDetail, and elapsedTime, and you must decide between letting throwOnError="true" raise exceptions or checking the status code yourself. Second, retry transient failures with exponential backoff — ColdFusion has no built-in retry, so you implement it with a loop and cftry/cfcatch, adding jitter to avoid thundering-herd problems. Third, add a circuit breaker — also not built in; you track consecutive failures in a shared cache and "open" the circuit to stop hammering a dead service, then half-open to test recovery. Fourth, log everything with the native cflog/writeLog to a dedicated log file. The two exception types you must catch are COM.Allaire.ColdFusion.HTTPFailure (connection failures) and coldfusion.runtime.RequestTimedOutException (timeouts). This guide builds all four layers with verified code.
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