script.aculo.us Ajax Sortable Lists adjustment for ColdFusion

So normally I’m a YUI guy. I enjoy their widgets and some of the other features available, and I’m comfortable with it. I work with several sites here that my co-workers work on, and they often prefer different JS Libraries. So I try to minimize the libraries on a site. Nothing more difficult, I feel, when you’re maintaining a website and have to maintain YUI, jQuery, Dojo, and Script.aculo.us/Prototype all at the same time and with all of those libraries loading for a client!

So I had to repair something that wasn’t working in IE8 (imagine that ) that was written quite some time ago. The site had script.aculo.us/prototype on it so I wanted to stick with that library. Thankfully, I came across this post: http://zenofshen.com/posts/ajax-sortable-lists-tutorial and it’s a pretty handy layout for PHP and Script.aculo.us. The problem arises at the bottom of the post. In PHP, you would be fine using this:

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parse_str($_POST['data']);

ColdFusion won’t parse out the string of list_to_sort[]=2&list_to_sort[]=1&list_to_sort[]=3 like that though. So I recommend making this adjustment to what’s coming through:

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<cfset newList = ListChangeDelims(url.data, "|", "list_to_sort[]=,&list_to_sort[]=")>
<cfset sortPos = listLen(newList, "|")>
 
<cfloop list="#newList#" delimiters="|" index="thisID">
       <cfquery name="insertSort" datasource="#request.source#">
               INSERT INTO 'table' (listID, sortOrder)
                     VALUES (#thisID#, #sortPos#)
        </cfquery>
 
        <cfset sortPos = sortPos - 1 />
</cfloop>