In an earlier post I eluded to the implicit creation of arrays in ColdFusion 8. Well, the same can be said of structures.
A structure, also known as an associative array, is a complex data type composed of a collection of keys and a collection of values, where each key is associated with one value (a key-value pair). The operation of finding the value associated with a key is called a lookup or indexing, and this is the most important operation supported by a structure. The relationship between a key and its value is sometimes called a mapping or binding. For example, if the value associated with the key "Age" is 29 and "City" is "London", we say that our structure maps "Age" to 29 and "City" to "London". Read more – ‘Implicit Structures in ColdFusion 8’.
A great new feature of ColdFusion 8 is its new implicit creation of Arrays and Structures. In addition to the updates to operators in ColdFusion, those of you familiar with JavaScript will recognise and welcome these changes.
An array is a data structure consisting of a group of elements that are accessed by indexing. In most programming languages each element has the same data type. However, ColdFusion, as we will see, is not strictly typed and therefore allows any data type to be stored in combination. This allows strings, integers, booleans and other complex data types all to be stored in the same array. However, doing this certainly isn't a good practice as it causes signification complication when accessing the stored data.
Variables of a simple data type commonly only store a single value but, in some situations, it is useful to have a variable that can store a series of related values - using an array. Arrays are described as complex data types because they can hold data in a structured, complex way. Read more – ‘Implicit Arrays in ColdFusion 8’.
