User Guide

244 Developing Web Applications with ColdFusion

All of Allaire’s WDDX serializers (CFML, COM, and JS) have an attribute/property

useTimezoneInfo that specifies whether time zone information should be used in the

serialization process. The default value is true.

In the CFML implementation, useTimezoneInfo is a property of the CFWDDX

Action=Cfml2WDDX tag. In the COM implementation,

useTimezoneInfo is a property

of the IWDDXSerializer interface provided by the object

WDDX.Serializer.1. In the JS

implementation

useTimezoneInfo (note the case-sensitivity of JS) is a property of the

WDDXSerializer object.

Date-time values in WDDX are represented using a subset of the ISO8601 format. Time

zone information is represented as an hour/minute offset from UTC, for example,

"1998-9-8T12:6:26-4:0".

During WDDX deserialization to CFML and COM time zone information is

automatically taken into account and all date-time values are converted to local time.

In this way, UTC is taken out of the picture entirely and developers do not need to

worry about the details of time zone conversions.

However, during deserialization to JavaScript expressions, time zone information is

not taken into account. Complications arise because of the difficulty of knowing the

time zone of the browser.

How WDDX Works

The WDDX vocabulary describes a data object with a high level of abstraction. For

instance, a simple object with two string properties might take the following form after

it is serialized into a WDDX XML representation for delivery via HTTP:

<string>Property a</string>

</var>

<string>Property b</string>

</var>

</struct>

</var>

The deserialization of this XML by the WDDX Deserializer object would create a

structure similar to what would be created directly by this JavaScript object

declaration: