
Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Using Web Services > Handling complex data types > Publishing web services that use complex data types Publishing structures

Publishing structures

A ColdFusion structure can hold an unlimited number of key-value pairs where the values can be of any ColdFusion data type. While it is a very useful and powerful way to represent data, it cannot be directly mapped to any XML data types defined in the SOAP 1.1 encoding and XML Schema specification. Therefore, ColdFusion structures are treated as a custom type and the complex type XML schema in WSDL looks like the following:

<complexType name="Map">
   <sequence>
      <element name="item" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
         <complexType>
            <all>
               <element name="key" type="xsd:anyType" />
               <element name="value" type="xsd:anyType" />
            </all>
         </complexType>
      </element>
   </sequence>
</complexType>

This complex type defines a representation of a structure, where the structure keys and values can be any type.

If you register the component in Dreamweaver MX, it appears in the Components tab of the Application panel.

In the WSDL mapping of a ColdFusion structure, each key/value pair in the structure points to the next element in the structure except for the final field, which contains a value. For example, if you have a structure containing the field A.B.C, that field is represented as the following figure shows:


Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Using Web Services > Handling complex data types > Publishing web services that use complex data types Publishing structures

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