StructAppend() the Forgotten Function
Posted May 23, 2006 at 7:40 AM
In my applications, I create an Attributes object (REQUEST.Attributes), which is a unbinding of the URL and the FORM scope. I was first introduced to this idea in FuseBox and I really like how it can simplify a good amount of code.
I was going over the code I use to create this last week. I thought my code was very simple, and yet some how, my boss, Jim Curran, was able to make a suggestion to simplify it even further. StructAppend(). Admittedly, I had to look it up because I wasn't exactly sure what it did - I am not sure I have ever used it.
Well, it does exactly what I wanted it to do. Of course, the code was very simple before, but now, it is even more so. I was able to take this:
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- // Copy the URL into the Attributes sturct. Unless we want to explicitly get
- // information from the FORM variables (as we do in add/edit screens), we are
- // just going to get it from the Attributes object to make things simpler and
- // the scoping more consistent.
- REQUEST.Attributes = Duplicate(URL);
-
- // Now, go over the form variables and copy those into attributes.
- for (LOCAL.Key in FORM){
- REQUEST.Attributes[ LOCAL.Key ] = FORM[ LOCAL.Key ];
- }
and make it this:
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- // Copy the URL into the Attributes sturct. Unless we want to explicitly get
- // information from the FORM variables (as we do in add/edit screens), we are
- // just going to get it from the Attributes object to make things simpler and
- // the scoping more consistent.
- REQUEST.Attributes = Duplicate(URL);
-
- // Now, move the form values into the Attributes object.
- StructAppend( REQUEST.Attributes, FORM );
As you can see, the difference is small, but we have removed a coded Loop and let ColdFusion handle the process with a built-in, hopefully more efficient method. All to say, sometimes, I try to come up with a solution that ends up being more complicated than a solution that is built into ColdFusion. This only goes to emphasize the point that people really need to understand the basics of the language.
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