Liking using implicit arguments for ColdFusion 9 functions
ColdFusion 9Each new version of a computer language inevitably brings about changes, mostly for the better, in the style of writing that language.
One change I have enjoyed with ColdFusion 9 is using implicit structures as arguments to a function. This leads to bundling of arguments into structures in cases where it makes more sense. Granted this has been going on in languages like JavaScript (and even the ColdFusion Javascript functions!) for a long time. There are definitely good and bad reasons to use this style.
Lets take a function, written with arguments individually defined, and see how this works:
That can be rewritten to:
This time we put all the cache settings in the cache argument.
Advantages:
- All cache settings are put in one structure.
- These arguments can potentially be defined in one application wide place and passed in easily (in a similar way that argumentCollection can be used).
Disadvantages:
- Slightly harder to document and validate
As I mentioned earlier I'm not suggesting using this for every function but for those that have a collection of config or style options it can work well. This is seen in a lot of JavaScript functions and used widely by jQuery.
Lately, I've liked using this approach in Ajax applications where, using CFAjaxProxy, I've been passing Javascript JSON objects to my CF functions via the proxy. The functions accept an argument of type Struct (the JSON object), containing multiple values. The combination of all this has made making CF/Ajax apps a breeze! Especially for prototyping. Cheers.
The downside is that you don't have an explicit contract with the consumer of the function so other developers better understand it. The upsides are that the consumer only has to specify the optional values he wants to set and that you get away from positional arguments which are a real pain when you have lots of options.
Loading....