ColdFusion 9/10 return fromat JSON?

Question

I have some data that I have to return after the Ajax call. On my .cfc page I have the logic that converts the data. Each column is tab delimited and each row is separated with CRLR. I have my cffunction returnformat set to JSON. After I return the data I use JavaScript to separate columns and rows in desired format. While I was doing this I saw few blogs where people were talking about all kind of problems with JSON in ColdFusion 9. On my development site I use ColdFusion 10 and I haven't notice any problem in my data. But on the live site I have ColdFusion 9 and I was wondering if that will cause some problems. In my data I have fields like Address and this field allows all kind of characters. Return type JSON in coldfusion 9 has the problem if your data is like this for example 2131231D if combination of strings and integers ends with D JSON will not return the same data. So my question is what I should do in this situation? Is there any fix for this problem? Is JSON reliable and recommended to use in ColdFusion 9? I was looking also for some tool that will convert my data on .cfc page that way I can avoid cffunction returnformat='JSON'. Here is my code:

<cfcomponent>
    <cffunction name="getData" access="remote" output="true" returnformat="JSON">
        <cfset fncResults = StructNew()>

        <cfif myFile = true>
            <cfoutput query="myData">
                //Here I organize my data
            </cfoutput>

            <cfset getList = arrayToList(buffer,crlf)/> 
            <cfset fncResults.status = "200">
            <cfset fncResults.fileData = #getList#>
        <cfelse>
            <cfset fncResults.status = "400">
            <cfset fncResults.message = "The file was not properly uploaded.">
        </cfif>

        <cfreturn fncResults>
    </cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

Here is my JavaScript:

function getFile(){
  $.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    url: 'Components/test.cfc?method=getData',
    data: new FormData($('#myForm')[0]),
    cache: false,
    dataType: 'json'
 }).done(function(obj){
    if(obj.STATUS === 200){
        return obj.FILEDATA;
    }else{
        return false;
    }
 }).fail(function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown){
    alert(errorThrown);
 });
}

Answer 1

Keeping your development and production environments as similar as possible to each other is a best practice. It reduces these kinds of "gotchas" when you push code to Production.

ColdFusion 10's JSON serializer/deserializer is vastly improved over CF9's. If you're working with a lot of JSON, then upgrading to CF10 on Production is a good idea. Until that's a possibility, using a separate serializer can help.

I suspect the "json cfc" that @KevinB mentioned Ben Nadel's JsonSerializer.cfc. It's available on Github (forked version, with a few extra features) at https://github.com/kevindb/JsonSerializer.cfc