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amy_yl
amy_yl
Participant
October 28, 2011
Question

How to use an array to organize and sort?

  • October 28, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 816 views

This is a basic ColdFusion question, but I don't do this enough to have progressed very far. Ugh.

I have a folder of documents on my web site that are newsletters, all in the filename format of mmddyy.cfm. I have created an display of these as links noting the date in text by using this:

<cfdirectory

          action="list"

          directory="D:\inetpub\leithpetwerks\BunFun\BFpages"

          name="Stuff"

          sort="Name">

<cfoutput query="Stuff">

<cfif (RIGHT(Stuff.name,4) EQ ".cfm") or (RIGHT(Stuff.name,5) EQ ".html")>

<a href="#Stuff.name#">#MonthAsString(left(Stuff.name,2))# #right(left(Stuff.name,4),2)#, #right(left(Stuff.name,6),2)#</a><BR>

</cfif>

</cfoutput>

But what I need to do is have them presented by chronological order... not the order they are present in the file system. Conceptually I imagine I'd throw then into an array and somehow address the sorting... but I have no idea how. Can someone help me?

Thanks in advance.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    I
    insuractive
    Inspiring
    October 28, 2011

    There are a couple of core ColdFusion objects/concepts that will greatly help you out here.

    First - the variable coming back from your <cfdirectoy> call is a CF Query object.  Coldfusion provides you with a way of re-ordering and re-organizing data stored in an existing query object using <cfquery> and the Query-of-a-Query functionality (e.g. dbtype="query").  Details are on Adobe Docs for <cfquery>

    Second, and this is outside of your original question but I noticed it in your code, CF has really great list parsing functions.  Particularly the ability to indicate an alternate list delimter.  Where am I going with this?  If you treat your file name as a delimeted list where the "." is the list delimeter, you'll notice that your file names are actually 2 element lists: e.g. MyFileName.cfm = Item 1: My FileName, Item 2: cfm

    Using the ListLast(Stuff.name, ".") will extract out the file extension from your filenames much more maintanably (is that a word?) than

    <cfif (RIGHT(Stuff.name,4) EQ ".cfm") or (RIGHT(Stuff.name,5) EQ ".html")>

    Especially if you wind up with other extensions in that directory.  Try it out and see how it works.

    -
    -__cfSearching__-
    Inspiring
    October 28, 2011

    When you say chronological order, do you mean the file name date or the o/s last modified date? If you mean the o/s modified date, try changing the cfdirectory "sort" to order by dateLastModified instead of name. I do not recall offhand if it is a string or date. But give it a shot.

    BKBK
    Community Expert
    BKBKCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 29, 2011

    <cfdirectory

              action="list"

              directory="D:\inetpub\leithpetwerks\BunFun\BFpages"

              name="Stuff"

              sort="dateLastModified Asc">

    or

    <cfdirectory

              action="list"

              directory="D:\inetpub\leithpetwerks\BunFun\BFpages"

              name="Stuff"

              sort="dateLastModified Desc">

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