Adobe ColdFusion 10 brings some improvements to manipulating arrays.

In this example we have two arrays called one and two. A new argument has been added to arrayAppend called arrayConcat that when true will append two arrays together.

one = ["a","c","e"];
two = ["b","d"];
arrayAppend( one, two, true );
writeDump( var=one, label="one after arrayAppend");

Array one now has all the values. The order seems a little off though. Enter arraySort which as its second argument takes a closure/function where you can write your own sort logic. Basic sorting is straightforward and its nice to have the flexibility to extend it when needed.

arraySort( one, function( a, b ) {
	return ( a > b );
});
writeDump( var=one, label="one after arraySort");

In the next example we'll filter the array by writing a closure to return an array with just the letters that are in my name.

filtered = arrayFilter( one, function( val ) {
	if ( reFindNoCase("s|a|m", val ) ) {
		return true;
	} else {
		return false;
	}
});
writeDump( var=filtered, label="filtered");

Slicing of arrays has also been added with the arraySlice function.

sliced = arraySlice( one, 1, 1 );
writeDump(sliced);

last = arraySlice( one, -1, 1 );
writeDump(last);

Where it makes send these functions also have list and struct equivalents.

ColdFusion 10 added implicit accessors and in this post I'll cover how to turn them on and use them.

Turning on implicit accessors is achieved via a straightforward setting in application.cfc:

Once on this means we can now access a getter and setter function of an object/cfc using the same syntax as if it where a struct. Let's look at a simple component called user.cfc:

Now let's see what happens when we make an object and start interacting with it:

As you can see from the code above when you call the implicit accessor on an object it calls the getter or setter function but within a cfc calling the variables scope directly calls the variable and not the getter or setter function.

One of the language enhancements in ColdFusion 10 beta is implicit/automatic constructors for CFC's. In short this means that if a component has defined properties and there is no init function ColdFusion will look to match the parameters passed in to the properties. Lets take a look at how it works:

Which will produce:

[cfc1] component user
Properties: 
	firstname: Homer 
	lastname: Simpson

Parameters can be passed in as name-value pairs or as a struct:

The ColdFusion 10 beta also includes ColdFusion Builder 2.0.1 beta (scroll down page). One nice addition is the option to specify language version on a per project basis rather than per editor.

For developers who work on multiple versions this is a great improvement.

An enhancement in ColdFusion 10 to cffile makes it very easy to write or append content to a file on physical disk, Amazon S3 or RAM disk.

In the following example a new file will be created:

In this example the content is appended to the file:

ColdFusion 10, now in public beta, adds for-in loops for query recordsets. The variable name in the for loop will reference each column by the column name.

The currentrow can be referenced by queryname.currentrow as seen in the example below. Same for recordcount.