I've been using ColdFusion since umm... 1996?, a long time anyway, so you'd think I'd know everything that there is to know about CF, its tags and functions. ;)

I jest, of course. There is always something new to learn that's exactly what I found out the other day.

I've just written a simple AJAX widget to go on a client's site to enable them to have a simple question/action work flow on their site. You know, the "Have you done this? Y/N" "If Yes do this, If No ask next question" kind of thing. It was pretty small workflow and I was contemplating simply hardcoding the whole thing. After a chat with a colleague to try and straighten some ideas out in my mind I decided to have an XML config file that contained the steps in the workflow.

Because the workflow is pretty simple I didn't really want to be requesting back to the server on each step, so I wanted to get my XML into javascript. Historically I've done this using CFWDDX, but my colleague pointed me to ToScript! I love all the CF tags, but functions are so much cleaner, especially when you're somewhere in the middle of a component and ToScript is no exception.

The only flaw in the plan was that ToScript takes a structure and doesn't see an XML object as a structure. Fortunately, without too much hassle I found Anuj Gakhar's XMLToStruct function and in 4 lines of neat code I go from XML file to javascript object. probably nothing new to most of you, but its always fun to use functions you haven't used before or forgot existed.

<cffile action="read" file="#locals.xmlPath#\my_workflow.xml" variable="locals.WorkFlowXMLString"> <cfset locals.WorkFlowXML = XMLParse(locals.WorkFlowXMLString) /> <cfset locals.stWorkFlow = ConvertXmlToStruct(locals.WorkFlowXML.xmlroot) /> <cfset locals.jsWorkFlow = ToScript(locals.stWorkFlow,"stWorkFlow") />