Archive for the ‘XML’ Category

Using WDDX instead of JSON to pass string of numbers

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

I’m a big fan of working with JSON data, but I did run into a snag that annoyed me a little the other day. Simply put JSON takes it upon itself to convert a string of numbers to a data type number. Normally I wouldn’t notice, but in this case I was trying to return a zip code that began with a zero. Each time it was returned, the zero had been eliminated. I returned it as just a string, ran it through the tostring() method and so forth. All with no luck.

In the end I packaged the zip code in a wddx packet.  This sets the value into some xml which types it as a string if it is a string despite the fact that it is all numbers.  When the data is returned it is returned as a string, keeping the leading zero.  I’ve set up a quick demo to illustrate this issue.  If you open it in the firebug console you will be able to see the JSON that is returned in comparison to the XML in the WDDX packet.

Also remember that if you are returning structs or arrays in JSON format you can store a WDDX packet as a JSON value-pair within the struct or array.  I’ve quickly showed this below.  If there is a way to control the data typing of JSON data I’d love to know how.

<!--- SET ZIP CODE --->
<cfset var zipcode = "02906">

<!--- CREATE A STRUCT --->
<cfset var data = structnew()>
<cfset data.success = true>
<cfset data.message = "This is some type of message.">
<cfset data.zipcode = "">

<!--- SET ZIP INTO A WDDX PACKET IN THE STRUCT --->
<cfwddx action="cfml2wddx" input="#zipcode#" output="data.zipcode">

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Posted in Coldfusion 8, JSON, WDDX, XML, jQuery | No Comments »

Using the UPS Shipping & Rating API with Coldfusion

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Just a heads up that this is a fairly long article and makes several assumptions about your application. Using the UPS API is fairly easy, but there are several variables that are required for the api to work successfully.

I’ll be making several assumptions here.  First and foremost that you are looking to implement the UPS shipping and rating API for ecommerce.  Second that you have a database set up with a table named ’shipping_tbl’ that includes column names ‘package_weight’, ‘package_width’, ‘package_length’, and ‘package_height’.  And that these values are in some way related to the products whose dimensions and weight they represent.  As well as other assumptions like how we store our cart data that will be further explained later.

Let’s start out with our HTML.  This is the HTML that represents your cart, which is where I assume you are showing the shipping rate for whatever packages are being sold.  We’ll pretend there’s a cart here.  I’m, however, only going to show the code for the output of the shipping rate.  So it is as follows.

The HTML (Output of shipping data)

<!---set our shipping rate--->
<cfset VARIABLES.shippingrate = "">

<span class=”shippingrate”>
	<!---output our shipping rate to the page--->
	<cfoutput>#dollarformat(VARIABLES.shippingrate)#</cfoutput>
</span>

(more…)

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Posted in Coldfusion 8, UPS, XML | No Comments »