Comments on: Implicit Arrays in ColdFusion 8

By: trev

trev — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:29:14 +0000

thanks simon thought that looked new!! in the interests of cleaner code and my cf8 exam coming up soon I will do it all with cfscript but I think cfscript is a huge barrier for us people who come from a non programming background(cfloops are difficult to get my head around once I start having to add 1’s to curly brackets and use for instead of cfif then my brain seems to just switch off!!).

Thanks again for pointing that out-another thing to learn now!!

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:05:33 +0000

The for loop uses the new to ColdFusion 8 javascript-style operators, which are not available in CF7.

You will need to replace the for loop with:

for (i = 1; i lte arrayLen(age); i=i+1)
{
…
}

By: trev

trev — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:00:26 +0000

my code does have the cfscript tags-when posting they were taken off!

By: trev

trev — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:57:48 +0000

Thanks for a great tutorial
For some reason I get an error on this code saying the cfscript tag needs to be closed. I can’t see why this cut and paste doesn’t work, using cfmx7 which at that part of the tutorial is fine I believe! Why do I get that error?

age = arrayNew(1);
age[1] = 19;
age[2] = 20;
age[3] = 21;
age[4] = 22;
age[5] = 23;
age[6] = 18;

sum_age = 0;

//loop over the age array adding age together all ages
for (i = 1; i <= arrayLen(age); i++)
{
sum_age += age[i];
}

//calculate the average age
average_age = sum_age / arrayLen(age);

writeOutput(average_age); // returns 20.5

By: Peter Boughton

Peter Boughton — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:08:41 +0000

By: Peter Boughton

Peter Boughton — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:57:24 +0000

I don’t like the CF8 syntax for this - just using symbols makes it harder to see at a glance what’s what.
I much prefer the explicit Struct() and Array() functions which Railo has, and which can be created as David showed above … although there’s a much simpler way to write it than all that lc.st stuff…

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:06:29 +0000

Instead of using the for-loop to calculate tha average values in the array, there is a little known function called ArrayAvg() that does it all for you. The function simply takes the name of the array and calculates the average of the values in the array.

Thanks to Iain Turbitt for that suggestion.

By: David Boyer

David Boyer — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:07:55 +0000

@Ben,

Well spotted, nested creation that way would be almost as sexy as the pics you sometimes use on your site

Now all I want sorted is named arguments for scoped functions and I’ll be a happy chappy

By: Dav

Dav — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:54:26 +0000

I’d spotted that too. You also can’t directly feed an implicitly created Array or Struct into a function argument, such as
ImageDrawText(myImage, someStr, x, y, {style=”bold”});

By: Ben Nadel

Ben Nadel — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:17:45 +0000

Ben Forta announced that nested struct and array notation will *probably* be in the next ColdFusion 8 updater

http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/2/29/Implicit-Array-And-Structure-Creation-Revisited