Form Data in Field Order

I've been working to create a ColdFusion drop-in replacement for the venerable FormMail perl script from Matt's Script Archive. One thing that had me scratching my head for many weeks was how to retrieve and output the submitted form fields in the same order they appeared in the html form.

The perl FormMail script did it by reading the STDIN buffer for the size of the $ENV('CONTENT_LENGTH'). Well, that's tough to translate into ColdFusion. I tried all kinds of functions in the GetPageContext().getRequest() object: getInputStream, getAttributeNames, getParameterMap, getParameterNames, getQueryString. There is some interesting stuff in there, but none of it was sorted in the order I wanted. And obviously the URL and FORM scope structures are sorted alphabetically. How could something so easy in Perl be so hard in ColdFusion? On Friday I was reading comments on a blog that prompted me to go down a slightly different path.

Mike Nimer from Adobe had an old blog entry on reading the http headers using some underlying java calls to get retrieve JSON data sent through in the http header. Well, I tried the code he had, but since I wasn't doing any JSON, there was no data to read.

Then Dan G. Switzer, II posted a comment discussing the native getHttpRequestData() function and the structure key called "content". Could it be the Holy Grail I was searching for these many weeks?

As it turns out, yes! God bless you Dan G. Switzer! The content key contains the form field name and value in the exact order they were in the HTML form and formatted similar to how the CGI.QUERY_STRING variable lists them. So getHttpRequestData().content returns something like: