The Situation: You have multiple items, each of which have multiple options that a user can select from. You want something that looks like this:

When the form is submitted, you want to insert separate records into a database for each row (or composer in this case).

The Solution: This is really a variant on another tutorial called "nested loops". Here, I'll show you how to use this for input fields. We start off with a list of composers and another list of time periods. I'll put these both in separate arrays of only one dimension. (I could use a list instead of an array for this, but arrays are a little easier to loop over.)

<cfset composers = ArrayNew(1)>



<cfset composers[1] = "Beethoven">

<cfset composers[2] = "Schumann">

<cfset composers[3] = "Hindemith">

<cfset composers[4] = "Glass">

<cfset composers[5] = "Monteverdi">

<cfset timePeriods = ArrayNew(1)>



<cfset timePeriods[1] = "Early">

<cfset timePeriods[2] = "Classical">

<cfset timePeriods[3] = "Modern">

You see that for each element in the composers array (i.e. each composer), I must account for every element in the timePeriods array. I can do this by looping through timePeriods while I'm looping through composers -- something called a "nested loop".

<form action="page_name.cfm" method="post">

 <table border="1">

  <cfloop from=1 to="#ArrayLen(composers)#" index="i">

   <tr>

    <td>

     #composers[i]#

    </td>

  <cfloop from=1 to="#ArrayLen(timePeriods)#" index="j">

    <td>

     <input type="Radio" name="#composers[i]#" value="#timePeriods[j]#">

      #timePeriods[j]#

     </td>

    </cfloop>

   </tr>

  </cfloop>

 </table>

 <cfwddx action="CFML2WDDX" input="#composers#" output="wddxComposers">

 <input type="hidden" name="wddxComposers" value="#wddxComposers#">

</form>

A word about the <CFWDDX> tag: WDDX is a nice piece of magic that 

converts any kind of variable (including query resultsets, arrays, and 

structures) into a particular kind of string. You can then pass this string 

along, just as you would with any other string. When it arrives on the other 

end, another <CFWDDX> tag will turn it back into a true CF variable. 

If I send the composers array off to the next page, I can loop through this array again -- this time inserting the values I find into a database. To send the array, I use the <CFWDDX> tag.

Now, on the page that will process this form, I first convert the WDDX string back into a ColdFusion array...

<cfwddx action="WDDX2CFML" input="#form.wddxComposers#" output="#composers#">

...and 

then loop over it to insert the form values passed to me into a database. 

<cfloop from="1" to="#ArrayLen(composers)#" index="i">

 <cfquery datasource="dsn">

 INSERT INTO aTable(

  composer,

  timePeriod

  )

 VALUES(

  '#composers[i]#',

  '#Evaluate('form.' & composers[i])#'

  )

 </cfquery>

</cfloop>