Ask Ben: Maintaining Case Of XML Attributes In Manually Created ColdFusion XML Documents

Just a really standard dumb "why?" question. I am querying a database and using the data to build an XML file used with some Flash component. Now for whatever reason this black-box Flash is highly case sensitive when it comes to XML. CF's default behavior breaks the component. Why is it that the CF XMLAttributes default to uppercase? Obviously it takes me about 5 seconds to do a RegEx replace when doing a ToString before saving it to file. But out of curiosity is there any voodoo magic lurking in the guts of CF to make XMLAttributes comply with my lust for lowercase markup?

Yes, there is some voodoo magic in ColdFusion to help you maintain the given case of XML attributes. The trick is to use explicit strings when settings struct values rather than attribute variables. By that, I mean that you have to use more of an array-type notation rather than a struct-type notation if you want the case of your attribute variables to carry through. Remember, ColdFusion is not case sensitive, so when you give it a variable name, the case has no meaning. To get around this with structs, use explicit strings.

I'm sure that wasn't explained well, so I'll demonstrate the issue when it comes to XML. First, I will build a ColdFusion XML document entirely with an explicit string using ColdFusion's CFXML tag:

Here, the entire ColdFusion XML document is explicit; ColdFusion doesn't have to make any guesses about case since it's all been spelled out. As such, when we run the code above, we get the following case-maintained output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <books list="recommended"> <book isbn="1878424505" title="The Four Agreements"/> <book isbn="0380717638" title="Muscle"/> <book isbn="0060933534" title="Plainclothes Naked"/> </books>

Now, because your attributes are not being maintained, I know that you are not building your XML documents in this manner. From your question, what I gather is that you are setting your XML attributes using CFSet tags and the XmlAttributes node collection as in this example:

Notice here that when we set the attributes (ex. XmlAttributes.title) we are using all lowercase labels. But, when we run the code above, we get the following output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <books list="recommended"> <book ISBN="1878424505" TITLE="The Four Agreements"/> <book ISBN="0380717638" TITLE="Muscle"/> <book ISBN="0060933534" TITLE="Plainclothes Naked"/> </books>

Notice that the ISBN and TITLE XML attributes have all been converted to uppercase. This is the issue you are experiencing when you pass the XML document off to your Flash movie.

It's hard to explain exactly why this happens as I don't know how ColdFusion works under the hood; but, I rationalize it as such: when you use dot-notation, you are really just setting a variable in the context of the parent struct. Think about it like this, if you are in a regular ColdFusion page and set a variable:

... this is really the same as this:

Variables are always scoped either explicitly or implicitly. Therefore, you can think of dot-notation as setting a variable rather than a "label". I know this is a bit of a stretch, but it's simply how I keep it clear in my mind.

But, like I said, there is a way to get around this: use explicit strings. Let's re-run the example from above, but this time, we will use array notation with explicit struct labels rather than "variable" handles:

Notice that this time, instead of setting a case-insensitive variable (ex. XmlAttributes.title), we are setting explicit variable lables (ex. XmlAttributes[ "title" ]). By doing so, we are letting ColdFusion know exactly how we want to index the given value. And, we run the above code, we do get a case-maintained output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <books list="recommended"> <book isbn="1878424505" title="The Four Agreements"/> <book isbn="0380717638" title="Muscle"/> <book isbn="0060933534" title="Plainclothes Naked"/> </books>

Notice that the case of the XML attributes isbn and title is the same in the output as it was in your CFSet statements. I hope that helps.

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