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Ben Nadel at InVision In Real Life (IRL) 2018 (Hollywood, CA) with: JD Courtoy
Ben Nadel at InVision In Real Life (IRL) 2018 (Hollywood, CA) with: JD Courtoy

Destroying ColdFusion Variables Using JavaCast()

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Published in Comments (5)

Not really that interesting, but you can destroy variables by setting them equal to the result of a JavaCast() to "null". I have beeing some testing with null values in ColdFusion lately and I did this for a goof:

<!--- Create the objFoo variable. --->
<cfset objFoo = StructNew() />
<cfset objFoo.Bar = "Well Played!" />

<!--- Destroy struct via JavaCast(). --->
<cfset objFoo = JavaCast( "null", 0 ) />

<!--- Dump out variable. --->
<cfdump var="#objFoo#" />

This throws the error:

Variable OBJFOO is undefined.

Now, I am not recommending this, nor should this ever be a replacement for the ColdFusion function StructDelete(). In fact, if you try to use this to destroy a structure element, it doesn't "really" work. Let's rework the code to destroy the structure key, not the structure:

<!--- Create the objFoo variable. --->
<cfset objFoo = StructNew() />
<cfset objFoo.Bar = "Well Played!" />

<!--- Destroy key via JavaCast(). --->
<cfset objFoo.Bar = JavaCast( "null", 0 ) />

<!--- Dump out variable. --->
<cfdump var="#objFoo#" />

This time, when you dump out the structure, "Bar" is still a key in the structure:

undefined struct element

However, its value is "[undefined struct element]" and any attempt to reference it directly will throw the error:

Element BAR is undefined in OBJFOO.

Interesting stuff.

Want to use code from this post? Check out the license.

Reader Comments

3 Comments

LOL "not really interesting"? This is extremely interesting if you use isdefined() to test for the existence of a single session variable and you want to destroy that one var without clearing the whole session scope!

10 Comments

This helped hugely. @cfjedimaster pointed me in the Javacast direction, then i found this from @bennadel.

I have a QoQ running after drawing out the data from an XML file.

My empty variables of "" were not working and throwing a Null Pointer error with no other information and hard to debug.

This is how i fixed it:

<cfset temp = QuerySetCell(myquery, "listing_field1", JavaCast( "null", 0 ), #i#)>

Sweet!

15,848 Comments

@Brien,

You can always use structDelete() to clear variables as well (which might be a little more self-documenting).

@Leigh,

Very nice! Query of Queries is awesome; but, they can really throw you through a loop when dealing with type-casting. I've learned to always always always use javaCast() when manually setting query values.

You might want to check out this post:

www.bennadel.com/blog/1820-Maintaining-ColdFusion-Query-Data-Type-Integrity-Throughout-The-Serialization-Life-Cycle.htm

It specifically talks about maintaining proper query cell values when deserializing from XML (WDDX).

1 Comments

Am using coldfusion 5 and the first piece of code did not throw error - "Variable OBJFOO is undefined.".
What am looking for is a solution to memory leak issue and so am wanting that all the variables should be killed at the end of the code. Any suggestions ?

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