Steven S. Ross

Just thought I’d point out that there is some odd behavior in XMLSearch() results. See the example below:

<cfxml variable="test">
<test>
    <node>
        <nodes>
        <nodeline>node1</nodeline>
        </nodes>
        <nodes>
        <nodeline>node2</nodeline>
        </nodes>
        <nodes>
        <nodeline>node3</nodeline>
        </nodes>
    </node>
</test>
</cfxml>

<cfset results = XMLSearch(test, "//nodes")/>

<cfset results1 = results[1]/> 

<cfdump var="#results1#"> 

Now if you run this you will see a dump that shows the root node as nodes but, if you try to reference the results as: results1.nodes.nodeline you will get an error. You have to reference the array as the root result. So the path to the nodelines becomes result.nodeline.

Hope that saves someone out there some headaches. I think that XMLSearch needs some major modification but, that may break backward compatibility so I guess Adobe is kinda locked in to how it works currently. For example, XMLSearch has some powerful features built in via XPath. However the way that ColdFusion returns the results is a bit bizzare. Well maybe not bizzare but, definately too verbose. So if you ask ColdFusion to return just the text assigned to the nodelines in the above example, it will return a full xml doc instead of just an array of values. So you end up parsing the data again. It would be really nice to just get an array of results back instead of an array of xml docs back. But, I digress.

If you want to learn XPath, just check out the docs here