by Ben Nadel

ColdFusion is a case insensitive language. However, it often has to communicate with languages, like JavaScript, that are not case sensitive. During the data serialization workflow, this mismatch of casing can cause a lot of headaches, especially when ColdFusion is your API-back-end to a rich-client JavaScript front-end application.

JsonSerializer.cfc is a ColdFusion component that helps ease this transition by performing the serialization to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) using a set of developer-defined rules for case-management and data-conversion-management. Essentially, you can tell the serializer what case to use, no matter what case the data currently has.

• asAny( key ) - Simply defines the key-casing, without any data conversion.
• asBoolean( key ) - Attempts to force the value to be a true boolean.
• asDate( key ) - Converts the date to an ISO 8601 time string.
• asFloat( key ) - Attempts to force the value to be a true float.
• asInteger( key ) - Attempts to force the value to be a true integer.
• asString( key ) - Forces the value to be a string (including numeric values).
• exclude( key ) - Will exclude the key from the serialization process.

The keys are defined using an all-or-nothing approach. By that, I mean that the serializer doesn't care where it encounters a key - if it matches, it will be given the explicitly defined casing. So, if you want to use "id" in one place and "ID" in another place within the same data-structure, you're out of luck. Both keys will match "id" and will be given the same case.

This is primarily intended to be used to return data from a server-side API. As part of that use-case, some of my philosophy is baked into it. Namely, an API usually returns a top-level struct / hash-map that defines the API result. This is why the serialization process is driven by the name of keys.