User Guide

Creating and Using Structures 127

Creating and Using Structures

This section explains how to use the structure functions to create and use structures

in ColdFusion. The sample code in this section uses a structure called employee,

which is used to add new employees to a corporate information system.

Creating structures

You create structures by assigning a variable name to the structure with the

StructNew function:

For example, to create a structure named employee, use this syntax:

Now the structure exists and you can add data to it.

Adding data elements to structures

After you create a structure, you add key-value pairs to the structure using the

StructInsert function:

<cfset value=StructInsert(structure_name, key, value

[, AllowOverwrite])>

The AllowOverwrite parameter is optional and can be either True or False. You can

use it to specify whether an existing key should be overwritten. The default is False.

When adding string values to a structure, enclose the string in quotation marks. For

example, to add a key, John, with a value, Sales, to an existing structure called

Departments, use this syntax:

The following example shows how to add content to a sample structure named

employee, building the content of the value fields dynamically using form variables: