yet another coldfusion blog

Yesterday was one of those "I need to get this to work, and I can't possibly be the first person to need to do this" type of developer days. In this particular instance, I had a huge data object sitting in JavaScript that I needed to send to a CFC for processing. I found a couple of recent ColdFusion-related blogs (any surprise that they were Raymond Camden's and Ben Nadel's ... thought not), but they didn't quite fit my requirements (i.e. had to work deeply across very large objects that could contain anything). There were hints (in the blogs and comments themselves) but not quite *exactly* what I needed.

After an hour or so of Google madness, piecing together advice from those two CF Guru's along with bits and pieces from other places, I seem to have found an absurdly easy (in hindsight) way of doing this.

Lets say, for instance, you have an object with a couple of arrays of structures, and data they contain is derived from user-entered forms. This is pretty much the perfect storm of data serialization, because not only do you have a series of deep and complex objects, but you have the unpredictability of what your user's might have entered. To deal with this we turn to the wonderful JSON. JSON is basically a serialization standard that turns complex objects and strings into a 'safe for transport' string. A StackOverflow article on a related subject pointed me towards two different methods but both pointing towards the JSON.org JSON parsing library (the library has been endorsed by none other than John Resig himself). JSON (the format and Object) is becoming native to the latest versions of many browsers, but this library will provide functionality to older versions as well.

By including json2.js into my framework, I can now use the following to post very complex objects to my CFC's:

$.ajax({ url: "[url-to-my-cfc]", data: { method: "[method-in-my-cfc]", data: JSON.stringify(data) }, type: 'POST' });

Thanks to this (i.e. a few lines of code that leverage the tremendous amount of work put in by other developers) my CFC receives a clean JSON object. I have tested this with respectably large data objects derived from form fields that in turn contained pasted-in JavaScript code (a mess that should easily identify any kinks in a serializing mechanism) and ColdFusion received and de-serialized it without issue.

I really like this methodology because the rest of my jQuery/ColdFusion application is using JSON for retrieving data from the server, so it seems only logical to send it back the same way. It also saves me from having to do any manual deserialization of the content that is posted to the server. The only real downside is it adds a bit of processing on the client side, but unless you are posting a really large volume of data it shouldn't be noticeable.