How to consume API in ColdFusion 10

Question

Can you please help me? I am trying to consume response in my ColdFusion application. Just wanted to try with this fake API before proceeding to the actual one.

I have created a component with two functions inside it. My cfc looks like this:

photoUploadNew.cfc

<cfcomponent displayname="test" hint="testing.." output="yes">
    <cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true" showdebugoutput="true">
    <cffunction name="start" access="public" output="no" returntype="any" description="initialize the component"> 
        <cfset variables.testUrl = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts">
        <cfreturn this> 
    </cffunction>

    <cffunction access="public" output="false" name="testGetReq" displayname="TestGetReq" description="testing" returntype="any"> 
        <cfset variables.testUrl = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts">   
        <cfhttp 
            result="httpResponsetest" 
                url="#variables.testUrl#" 
                timeout="30" 
                method="get"
        >
        <cfhttpparam
                type="header"
                name="Content-Type"
                value="application/json"
        />
    </cfhttp>
        </cfhttp>   
        <cfreturn httpResponsetest> 
    </cffunction>   
</cfcomponent>

In my cfm page. I am trying to instantiate this component and print whatever I am getting as a response but I am not able to print anything out there.

<cfset testObj = CreateObject("component","usedGear_admin.cfc.photoUploadNew").testGetReq()>
<cfoutput >
    #testObj#
</cfoutput>

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I think you are using cfhttp result wrong here. When we do a cfhttp call,

<cfhttp
  method="get"
  result="httpResponsetest"
  url="https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
  timeout="30"
>
</cfhttp>

They try the following, you will see httpResponsetest has multiple keys. The data provided by API will be present in httpResponsetest.fileContent. Also most of the time there is Mimetype,Responseheader,Statuscode etc.

<cfdump var="#httpResponsetest.fileContent#">

Here you can see the data is in JSON format. That means you'll need to deserialize them to be able to use it.

<cfdump var="#deserializeJSON(httpResponsetest.fileContent)#">

You can deserialize it and return from the function. Along with that you'll need to handle the case where API responds with am error.

Demo