Here’s a quick little tidbit. My coworker Steve Good asked me if I knew of a quick way to merge two ColdFusion structures together, kind of like how jQuery has the $.extend() method. Well there is in fact a way to do this! And it’s super easy.

Let’s say you have structure one that has two keys, firstName and lastName.

<cfset struct1 = { firstName = "Adam", lastName = "Presley" } />

And now we have structure two that has two keys, firstName and age.

<cfset struct2 = { firstName = "Michael", age = 33 } />

Using a nifty ColdFusion method we can mash the two together in a single line of code.

<cfset structAppend(struct1, struct2) /> 
<!--- <cfset struct1.putAll(struct2) /> --->

Woah, that was easy! The end result will be a structure that would look like this.

<cfset struct1 = { firstName = "Michael", lastName = "Presley", age = 33 } />

Notice the commented out version. That is the underlying method to do the same thing as StructAppend. The benefit? Nothing I can think of. :)

Enjoy, and happy coding!