Question

So I’m working on a pie chart using HighSlide and ColdFusion.

To make this simple, for the data it expects a string like this:

data: [{name: 'Jane',y: 13}, {name: 'John',y: 23}, {name: 'Joe',y: 19}]

What i’ve done to accomplish this is to loop through my query results and create a string like this:

<cfloop query="getAreaCounts">
     <cfset areaList = listAppend(areaList, "{name: '#name#',y: #y#}")>
</cfloop>

I know there has to be an easier/smarter way right? Since this is JSON data, i figured I could just do this:

<cfoutput>#SerializeJSON(getAreaCounts)#</cfoutput>

But that returns a JSON string like this which highcharts won’t process:

{"COLUMNS":["Y","NAME"],"DATA":[[8,"Area1"],[7,"Area2"],[1,"Area3"],[1,"Area4"]]}

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be great. Do I need to dig deeper into a JSON – howto?

Answer 1

You’re going to want to convert the query to an array of structs and then run serializeJSON() on that array.

Below is a method that I use pretty frequently when working with a lot of queries and JSON. I think that I got it from Ben Nadel’s site and then converted it to cfscript.. I’ll try to track down the blog post after I post this answer.

public array function queryToArray( required query qry ) {
    var columns = arguments.qry.getColumnNames();
    var ofTheJedi = [];

    for( var i = 1; i LTE qry.recordCount; i++ ) {
        var obj = {};

        for( var k = 1; k LTE arrayLen( columns ); k++ ) {
            structInsert( obj, columns[ k ], arguments.qry[ columns[ k ] ][ i ] );
        }

        arrayAppend( ofTheJedi, obj );
    }

    return ofTheJedi;
}

So, in your case you would do something like this:

<cfset myJSON = queryToArray( getAreaCounts ) />
<cfoutput>#serializeJSON( myJSON )#</cfoutput>

EDIT: Here’s Ben’s blog post that inspired the method above: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/124-Ask-Ben-Converting-a-Query-to-an-Array.htm