If you’ve worked with CommonSpot’s ADF before, you’ve likely used the getCEData function. It’s a convenient way to retrieve data from custom elements, with powerful filtering options to zero in on only the records you want.
Unfortunately, getCEDAta does not give you any way to control the sequence in which these records are returned (e.g. ORDER BY State, City, ZipCode). Since it returns its results in an array of structs, you need to convert the results over to a query if you want to sort them by more than one field.
This conversion process isn’t difficult. It’s nothing more than creating a query, looping through the array, adding a new row to the query, and populating the current record with a series of QuerySetCell calls. The most tedious bit was manually specifying the column names on a case by case basis, so I finally wrote a function with two nested cfloops, the first which iterates through the array, and the second to loop through the column names dynamically.
Here it is, if you are interested:
I’m hoping a future version of getCEData will allow us to specify the format in which the results are returned, similar to the findAll() function of the CFWheels framework, so we can get a query back instead of an array of structs.
