ColdFusion Causes Frustration {HTML Input Element Arrays}

I don’t understand why ColdFusion insists on making things difficult. I’ve come to understand that it is not possible for ColdFusion to make use of inherent input arrays when one or more input elements is left empty. For some reason ColdFusion always drops the empty values from the array. I can’t think of any possible scenario where this is desired behavior. Given the following mark up:

<input type="text" id="first_widget" name="widget" value="First Widget" />
<!--- Notice the lack of a value in the following element --->
<input type="text" id="second_widget" name="widget" value="" />
<input type="text" id="third_widget" name="widget" value="Third Widget" />

Once submitted, parsing through the HTML array with .NET or PHP will produce:

widget[0] = “First Widget”
widget[1] = “”
widget[2] = “Third Widget”

With ColdFusion it ends up looking like:

widget[1] = “First Widget”
widget[2] = “Third Widget”

It completely drops the second array element because it’s an empty value. The obvious solution to this is to not have elements share a common name. I’ll index my form elements like so:

<input type="text" id="first_widget" name="widget_1" value="First Widget" />
<!--- Notice the lack of a value in the following element --->
<input type="text" id="second_widget" name="widget_2" value="" />
<input type="text" id="third_widget" name="widget_3" value="Third Widget" />

The argument could be made that indexing multiple common HTML elements is always a good idea, but I don’t like having to do it just to make up for the seemingly short coming of a program language. It also makes some additional work if I’m generating form elements dynamically and don’t know how many I’m going to end up with before the form is actually submitted.

Given the above mark up, I’m left to loop through each item to build my array, or structure, or error checking, etc. Whatever it is I want to do with the actual data, I’m left with an extra step to actually get it because of this.

Unless I’m really just missing something all together? Anybody know of a better way?