If you need to control the order of the attributes, you'll need to write your xml out by hand... according to the XML specification, attribute ordering must not be significant, so strictly-speaking your requirement here requires something of XML that's contrary to its intent.  And, accordingly, there's no way of making CF respect something that's intrinsically not supposed to be respected.

NB: "I'm using xmlParse() to read an XML file into a structure,"... xmlParse() creates an XML object, not a struct, so what you're asking in your last para doesn't really make sense.  xmlParse() will only create an XML object. If you want to read the XML data as something other than XML, you'll need to write your own function.

The best solution here, if poss, is to remove the significance of the attribute order in your app, because it's "wrong" to infer any ordering, and you're making a bit of a logical rod for your own back in relying on this ordering.

Not a "just do it like this" response, sorry, but that's what one gets when the question is submerged in a can of worms... ;-)

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Adam

but using ColdFusion to process XML in this way is making a pretty big change in the XML structure.

No, it's not changing the structure in any meaningful way: the attribute ordering isn't meaningful in XML, so if the order of them changes, then that's not a meaningful change.  In any way that XML should be used, it doesn't matter.

When CF reads an string (like file contents) and parses it as XML, it needs to create an XML object; that XML object will adhere to the rules of XML; one of which is "atribute order has no significance", so it will not (and ought not) bother to "remember" the order that the attributes were in in the original string.  When one converts that object back into a string, some sort of ordering needs to be used to write them back, and CF seems to arbitrarily use alphabetical order.  But it cannot refer back to information that it doesn't have (the original ordering), so the original ordering can't be preserved.

There's nothing unreasonable or that shouldn't be expected in this process, unfortunately (for you, I mean).

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Adam

As has been mentioned, it's just not how XML works. Does XSLT allow for ordering?

hopefully they can add some attribute in CF10 to say don't change the order that's explicitly specified when the XML is created.

It would appear not.

I'd be surprised if anyone made a change like that, as it's not a requirement of XML it's more that your other systems "happen" to display them in order; they equally could not and still be valid. XML was never meant to be displayed as such, and as far as I know it's only human-readable as a by-product of it being a text-based standard; I'm not sure this was so it could be "easily read" by people.

Generally you'd parse the XML and display it in your own format, so ordering wouldn't be an issue.