Webmaster Forum / ColdFusion / Advanced Techniques / April 2006

You could use locks, thus

<!--- for PDF documents at application level, with access to all users --->
<cflock name="pdfLock" timeout="6" type="EXCLUSIVE">
<!--- ...creating a PDF file with CFHTTP (a third party tool is creating it) I
need to know when the file which is located in the same folder is done
creating. Normally it doesn't take but 3-4 seconds --->
</cflock>
<cflock name="pdfLock" timeout="2" type="READONLY">
<!--- use CFLOCATION is direct the user to the PDF file  --->
</cflock>

<!--- for PDF documents at session level, with access to the current user--->
<cflock scope="session" timeout="6" type="EXCLUSIVE">
<!--- ...creating a PDF file with CFHTTP (a third party tool is creating it) I
need to know when the file which is located in the same folder is done
creating. Normally it doesn't take but 3-4 seconds --->
</cflock>
<cflock scope="session" timeout="2" type="READONLY">
<!--- use CFLOCATION is direct the user to the PDF file  --->
</cflock>

I wasn't looking for an alphabetical list, just trying to get to the inner most
nested struct the quickest.  In you example, how would I get the value of
employee.phone.office.ext  without previousley knowing that phone.office.ext
existed and I only know about employee. I could iterate over it with some type
of iterator hasNext(), but was wondering if there was a quicker way.

<cfset employee.name.first = "Mary">
<cfset employee.name.last = "Smith">   
<cfset employee.position = "Boss">
<cfset employee.phone.home = "111-2222-33333">
<cfset employee.phone.office.ext = "444">
<cfset employee.phone.office.number>