B and E Blog

As you probably know, ColdFusion 8 gave us a long-needed shorthand for creating arrays and structures:

1. a = "1",
2. b = "2",
3. c = "3"
4. }>
5. "a",
6. "b",
7. "c"
8. ]>

Unfortunately you couldn’t nest those constructs. With the 8.0.1 updater though, you now can:

1. a = ["x", "y", "z"],
2. b = ["s", "t", "u"],
3. c = ["m", "n", "o"]
4. }>

This is fantastic when you’re trying to make configurable code - a chunk of code whose basic function is tweakable by updating a few settings variables at the top instead of hard-coding them in throughout the code (for example - URLs, filesystem paths, data sources, etc).