A user pinged me earlier this morning with an interesting issue. His Ajax application wasn't working as expected. He was using jQuery to hit a CFC. Instead of showing you his code, I simplified it a bit which should make the problem a bit simpler to see. Try and figure it out before reading on:

It's a bit subtle - but the issue is that he mixes both returnFormat and serializeJSON. I've blogged about returnFormat quite a bit. It's one of my favorite features of ColdFusion 8 and it got little press. His use of it here though is not something I normally recommend. You can pass returnFormat as an argument in the request or you can specify it in the method inline as he did. To me - using it inline is a bad idea. Not "bad" bad, but I don't think the CFC should be concerned with its return form. Instead, it should simply handle it's business logic and let the caller ask for a particular format.

Where things go wrong is the serializeJSON. What's happening here is that CF first runs the code of the method (Make a struct, then JSON it), and then it formats the result in JSON. So basically it JSON encodes a string that is already JSON encoded.

If you view this result (*), you can see the result is a bit funky:

"{"TIME":"June, 03 2008 08:20:06","NAME":"Current Time"}"

All those \ should tip you off. If you remove the serializeJSON, you see a result that should look a bit better:

{"TIME":"June, 03 2008 08:20:06","NAME":"Current Time"}

I'd remove both the serializeJSON and the returnFormat. I'd then edit the jQuery code's URL to add returnFormat=JSON.

*Ok, so let me use this blog entry to say once again that 99% of Ajax problems can be solved with a tool like Firebug. Firebug would have let you see the Ajax request and response, and if you were familiar with JSON, it would have been an big clue. It's also a handy way to see times when you forget to turn off CF debugging.