Form Data in Field Order Part II

As a follow up to yesterday's post and the comments by "Some guy", I did a bit of experimenting with form.fieldnames versus getHttpRequestData().content. There are some significant differences in how the two treat form data:

form.fieldnames

• All uppercase field names
• No values (use form[fieldname] to access)
• Comma-delimited
• Form[fieldname] values are automatically URL decoded by ColdFusion
• Only one field name is output even when multiple fields had the same name in the form

getHttpRequestData().content

• Case of field names matches case used in HTML form
• FieldName=Value syntax
• Each name/value pair delimited by an ampersand
• Both the name and the value are URL encoded (e.g. spaces are replaced by the plus sign, the @ sign is replaced by it's hexadecimal equivalent, etc.)
• Multiple fields with the same name in the form are output multiple times (according to their location in the form)

In the end, I decided to switch over to using the form.fieldnames because of the automatic URL decoding.

This discussion has been an exercise in humility since: (1) I have been working with ColdFusion since version 4.0, (2) I have used form.fieldnames before, (3) but I have never noticed nor read anyone (that I recall) that the fields are listed in the form order.