Structure Notation - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION 5-DEVELOPING Develop Manual

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Structure notation

ColdFusion supports three types of notation for structures. Which notation you use
depends on your needs:
Notation
Object.property
Associative arrays
Structure functions
Chapter 8 Handling Complex Data with Structures
Description
Use to refer to values in a structure. You can refer to a
property, prop, of an object, obj, as obj.prop. This
notation is useful for simple assignments, as in this
example:
depts.John="Sales"
Use this notation only when you know the property
names (keys) in advance and they are strings, with no
special characters, numbers, or spaces. You cannot use
the dot notation when the property, or key, is dynamic.
If you do not know the key name is in advance, or it
contains spaces, numbers or special characters, you
can use associative array notation. This notation uses
structures as arrays with string indexes, for example,
depts["John"] or depts["John Doe"]="Sales.".
Use structure functions when you cannot use the simpler
syntax styles.
You must use structure functions to create and remove
structures and their elements, including renaming keys.
You do not need structure functions to access value data
in structures or to change the values in the key value
pairs.