Comments on: ColdFusion Struct Literals Fail Again

By: barneyb

barneyb — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:54:50 +0000

Adam,

I haven't. And it's not in the bug base either. But jesus is that a horrible example of how to build a Flex app. I give up.

I have submitted it via the feedback/bug report form, but no idea where things go after that.

By: Adam Tuttle

Adam Tuttle — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:48:19 +0000

Barney, have you submitted this as a bug now that we have the public bugbase? I'd vote for it, and I know a handful of others that would, too.

By: ColdFusion Struct Literals Are Not Thread Safe (CFML Ones Are) at BarneyBlog

ColdFusion Struct Literals Are Not Thread Safe (CFML Ones Are) at BarneyBlog — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:45:03 +0000

[...] lets you write some really nasty code, causes some weird bugs, and today I realized (through some handy errors on our production cluster) that there are thread [...]

By: Ben Nadel - At It Again at BarneyBlog

Ben Nadel - At It Again at BarneyBlog — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:18:50 +0000

[...] Ben Nadel posted another interesting code snippet this moring.Â NEVER EVER USE IT.Â It leverages a horrible bug in ColdFusion's implementation of struct literals that I've blogged about previously. [...]

By: barneyb

barneyb — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:59:07 +0000

Elliot,

Having quoted keys would definitely be a nice feature. Though even better would be allowing colons or equals signs for the key/value separator so you can use a colon like basically every other language.

On Railo, you can use struct/array literals as expressions, meaning you can use them in CFRETURN, as function/method arguments, or any where else. The only-assignment restriction is a ColdFusion issue, not a CFML issue. So people are implementing it correctly, just Adobe totally dropped the ball.

By: Elliott Sprehn

Elliott Sprehn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:34:18 +0000

Also, for that matter, why can't we pass literals as attribute values or directly in function calls?All the above languages also support that.

By: Elliott Sprehn

Elliott Sprehn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:31:40 +0000

Sigh, this does seem to be an extremely half baked feature. Hopefully once the CFML committee is up and running and there's a real standard for how the language should behave we'll be able to push Adobe to fix this stuff. I'd really like to see allowing quoted strings in the name part. { "Something With Spaces" = [ "a", "b", "c" ] } php, ruby, python, perl, groovy, javascript, as3 ... Everyone has literal notation like this now that allows quotes and proper nesting. Why are we in the stone age? :/

By: barneyb

barneyb — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:36:39 +0000

Derik, With CF 8.0.1, you can mix-and-match nested array and struct literals (e.g. [{id=1}, {id=2}]). It was only disallowed in the initial 8.0 release. Even more perplexing for the '=' decision is that both JavaScript, and named CFC/UDF parameters use the ':'. The '=' is accepted for named CFC/UDF parameters, but not required. To make it consistent with the existing language features, they should have at least allowed both. I'd have preferred to only allow ':' and deprecate the '=' in CFC/UDF parameters, but oh well.

By: Derek P.

Derek P. — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:40:55 +0000

I absolutely hate the "=" syntax, what were they thinking!? I imagine the thought process was "easier for developers to 'get'", but I still think its absolutely unconventional. I wasn't aware you couldn't nest structs using literal syntax either, interesting.

By: Sean Corfield

Sean Corfield — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:42:16 +0000

OK, that was completely unclear (to me). I didn't realize you were saying the first fragment didn't work! Yeah, then in that case, I agree that it's broken.