Question

I am passing a CFC a JSON, and there is a key that may or may not exist. So, I am checking it with isDefined, but for whatever reason, coldfusion doesn’t think it exists, when, from what I’m seeing it clearly does. I have tried everything I can think of, but now I’m at a loss for what the problem is.

Here is the JSON pulled from Firebug:

[{"type":"USEQUIT","date":"01/01/2011"}] //the date, may or may not exist

Here is the only important part of the CFC function:

<cfargument name="attribs">
//debugging code
<cfif isDefined("attribs.date")>
    <cfdump var="date here">
<cfelse>
    <cfdump var="date not here">
</cfif>

I do this above in other function, and it works fine, but for whatever reason, I cannot get it to work here. I’m assuming that I’m doing something wrong, but I cannot figure it out, so I’m asking the community.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

CF sees the json you pass as plain text string until you call deselializeJSON() on it:

<cfargument name="attribs">
//debugging code
<cfset var ds_attribs = deserializeJSON(arguments.attribs)>
<cfif structKeyExists(ds_attribs[arrayLen(ds_attribs)], "date")>
    <cfdump var="date here">
<cfelse>
    <cfdump var="date not here">
</cfif>