Today I needed to get all the elements in one list that were not members of a second list. That may ring a bell — it’s known as a set difference, or a relative complement.
Although it would have been simple to loop through first the list and add only the elements not present in the second list to a new list, I thought I would look around to see if anyone had already implemented set operations in ColdFusion, e.g. on cflib.org. I was surprised that I didn’t find anything, so I decided to create my own, as much as an exercise as anything, and posted it to Bitbucket:
arraySet: ColdFusion set operations
I included the following operations:
- union
- intersection
- set difference
- subset
- equality
- size
In the process, I experimented with MXUnit, a unit testing suite for ColdFusion that integrates with Eclipse. (I am currently taking a Scala programming course that emphasizes Test-Driven Development, or TDD, so I thought I should try it in CF as well.)
Since I was implementing sets using arrays as the underlying data structure, I also decided to use cfinterface to define a set interface, which arraySet implements. I had never used cfinterface before, and although its usefulness has been questioned, it seemed more appropriate than extending a base set class.