what i have to do is make sure that they only select a certain amount of items i have looked everywhere but it must be a simple thing that i cannot think of please any help would be great!! so i think that all i need to do is track the number that is selected when they click submit but i cannot find the answer please help me.

The fill2 variable will be a list containing the values of the checked checkboxes. It could be undefined if none are checked, so you should use cfparam to default to the empty string.

thank you for the reply....
i haven't used <cfparam> yet and i will look into it now thank you but what i need to now is how do i make it that they have to select 4 no more no less how do i track how many that they have selected.
what they want is three radio buttons that determines how many fills they want (4,5,6)
and under that i have 8 checkboxes that are the fills but how many that they aloud to be selected depends on the three radiobuttuons
thanks for the help

As I said, it'll be a list, so use listlen on the form variable. Assuming you sent it as a post request, it would be form.fill2:

thanks mate that worked :) well

You're welcome :) Glad it worked.