Coldfusion 10 - looping over structures returned in JSON from SendGrid

Question

SendGrid is changing their eventhook system to post JSON to a web page. When the data is deserialized it's a collection of arrays, which each contain potentially different keys based on the event. I need to process and add entries to our e-mail tracking database based on the event, containing the data is the arrays or an array within the array.

I'm looking for a way to efficiently process these returned arrays. My initial thought was to do a cfswitch with the 'event' as the expression. If I know an event=bounced, I know what other keys to expect within the array.

While I'm sure that will work, I'm wondering if there isn't a better methodology or approach instead of creating a switch/case for 8 different events that return different arrays.

Answer 1

I would compartmentalize my code into an object that can determine what should/shouldn't be done. So you would have something like this:

<cfcomponent displayname="SendGridProcessor">

    <cffunction name="processEvent" access="public" returntype="void" output="false">
        <cfargument name="EventData" type="struct" required="true" />

        <cfswitch expression="#Arguments.EventData.Event#">

            <cfcase value="processed">
                <cfset processEventProcessed( Arguments.EventData ) />
            </cfcase>

            <cfcase value="dropped">
                <cfset processEventDropped( Arguments.EventData ) />
            </cfcase>

        </cfswitch>

    </cffunction>

    <cffunction name="processEventProcessed" access="private" output="false" returntype="void">
        <cfargument name="EventData" type="struct" required="true" />
        <!--- do your processing --->
    </cffunction>

    <cffunction name="processEventDropped" access="private" output="false" returntype="void">
        <cfargument name="EventData" type="struct" required="true" />
        <!--- do your processing --->
    </cffunction>

</cfcomponent>

This allows you to have a single method that you can call as you loop through your events, and an easy way to separate out your logic based on the event that's being passed from SendGrid.