quoting it like "name" = whatever works for case, but i'm not seeing anything about the ordering

arrays are natively ordered, aren't they? I've had to create ordered structs on occasions when I wanted attributes in a certain order but it shouldn't be re-ordering arrays just from serializing them

they're being created via arrayAppend.. so that may be where the ordering is getting messed up.

Arrays would stay in sequential order. Structs (which is what most JSON objects are) would be not be ordered.

thanks. i'll give that a whirl

for future ref, in lucee (not sure about ACF) you can declare a struct to be ordered with shorthand

[:];

or

[=];

https://docs.lucee.org/reference/functions/structnew.html

structs are deserialized ordered on import, and if they are ordered, then that is preserved when serializing