Insert a Coldfusion struct into a database

Question

If I wanted to save a contact form submission to the database, how can I insert the form scope in as the submission? It's been some time since I used Coldfusion.

The contact forms vary depending on what part of the site it was submitted from, so it needs to scale and handle a form with 5 fields or one with 10 fields. I just want to store the data in a blob table.

Answer 1

If you can't normalize the form fields into proper table(s), you can try storing them:

• in XML (SQL Server supports XML pretty well), or
• in JSON (in a plain varchar field), or
• ObjectLoad() & ObjectSave() (CF9 only) to store as blob.

IIRC there are ways to get object load/save functionality in pre-CF9 by tapping into Java. http://www.riaforge.org/ or http://cflib.org/ might have it.

Answer 2

Most space efficient way and least complicated to turn back into original shape is using serializeJSON. After that, you can use something like key:value|key:value, or XML representation of your struct.

Answer 3

I don't know that there is a way to store a native structure into a database, but have you thought about using JSON to represent your object as key-pair values and then parsing it into a native structure after retrieving it from the database?

There are tags/functions out there that will help you with the encoding and decoding into JSON:

• cfJSON Tag
• CF8 Serialize JSON
• CF8 Deserialize JSON

Answer 4

Cfwddx is also an alternative.