MACROMEDIA COLFUSION MX 7-GETTING STARTED BUILDING COLDFUSION... User manual

COLDFUSION®MX 7

Getting Started Building ColdFusion MX Applications

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Part Number ZCF70M200

Acknowledgments

Project Management: Randy Nielsen

Writer: Anne Sandstrom

Editors: Linda Adler, Noreen Maher

Production Management: Patrice O’Neill,

Media Design and Production: John Francis, Adam Barnett

Special thanks to Sawako Gensure, Seungmin Lee, Takashi Koto, Nozomi Kugita, Masayo Noda, Hiroshi Okugawa, Bowne

Global Solutions

First Edition: January 2005

Macromedia, Inc.

600 Townsend St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

PART I: Welcome to ColdFusion

CHAPTER 1: Introducing ColdFusion MX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

About ColdFusion MX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

How ColdFusion processes pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Building applications with CFML. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

CHAPTER 2: CFML Basics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Working with ColdFusion pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

About CFML elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Working with CFML expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

About conditional processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Processing form data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Commenting your code. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

CHAPTER 3: Database Fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

About database basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

About SQL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Using SQL with ColdFusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

PART II: Building a ColdFusion Application

CHAPTER 4: Lesson 1: Preparing to Build the Sample Application . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Application development steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Exercise 1: Determining the application functional requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Exercise 2: Determining the data requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Exercise 3: Designing the database for your application. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Exercise 4: Developing the sample application. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

4 Contents

CHAPTER 5: Lesson 2: Configuring Your Development Environment. . . . . . . . . 49

Exercise 1: Verifying the tutorial file structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Exercise 2: Setting up your development environment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Exercise 3: Configuring a database connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Exercise 4: Configuring debugging options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

CHAPTER 6: Lesson 3: Retrieving Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Exercise 1: About the trip list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Exercise 2: Retrieving the information for the trip list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Exercise 3: Displaying the query result using the cfoutput tag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Exercise 4: Writing structured, reusable code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Exercise 5: Creating additional queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

CHAPTER 7: Lesson 4: Building Dynamic Queries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Exercise 1: Creating the trip search form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Exercise 2: Building a query that uses dynamic SQL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Exercise 3: Constructing the initial Trip Search Results page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Exercise 4: Testing the Trip Search Results page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Exercise 5: Enabling the departure and price criteria on the Trip Search form . . . . 82

Exercise 6: Testing the revised Trip Search Results page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

CHAPTER 8: Lesson 5: Creating a Trip Detail Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Exercise 1: Creating a Trip Detail page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

Exercise 2: Avoiding the potential security risk when using dynamic SQL. . . . . . . 91

Exercise 3: Linking the Trip Search Results page with the Trip Detail page . . . . . . 92

Exercise 4: Enhancing the look of the Trip Search Results and Trip Detail pages . . 93

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

CHAPTER 9: Lesson 6: Creating a Main Application Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Exercise 1: Creating the main application page from the Trip Detail page . . . . . . . 98

Exercise 2: Adding database maintenance buttons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

CHAPTER 10: Lesson 7: Validating Data to Enforce Business Rules. . . . . . . . . 103

Exercise 1: Using an HTML form to collect data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Exercise 2: Creating a simple action page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Exercise 3: About data validation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Exercise 4: Providing server-side validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Exercise 5: Validating data on the client using ColdFusion form tags. . . . . . . . . . 114

Exercise 6: Dynamically populating the list of event types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Exercise 7: Validating the existence of the trip photo file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

Contents 5

CHAPTER 11: Lesson 8: Implementing Browsing and Searching. . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Exercise 1: Enabling users to browse trip details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Exercise 2: Determining actions based on which button a user clicks. . . . . . . . . . 127

Exercise 3: Enabling searching from the Trip Detail page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

CHAPTER 12: Lesson 9: Enabling Database Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Exercise 1: Deleting the current trip record shown on the Trip Detail page . . . . . 129

Exercise 2: Adding trips with SQL INSERT statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Exercise 3: Adding data using the cfinsert tag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Exercise 4: Updating a SQL row using the cfupdate tag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Exercise 5: Linking the Trip Edit page to the main page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

Exercise 6: Inserting values in the edit form. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

CHAPTER 13: Lesson 10: Restricting Access to ColdFusion Applications . . . . 143

Exercise 1: About the Login Wizard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Exercise 2: Requiring users to log in to the Compass Travel application. . . . . . . . 147

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

6 Contents

INTRODUCTION

Getting Started Building ColdFusion MX Applications is intended for anyone who needs to begin

programming in the Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 development environment. This manual

includes a tutorial, which uses supporting files that are installed if you chose to install sample

applications. If you did not install the ColdFusion MX sample applications, you can download

the tutorial files from the ColdFusion Support center on the Macromedia website.

About Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 documentation

The ColdFusion MX 7 documentation is designed to provide support for the complete spectrum

of participants.

Documentation set

The ColdFusion MX 7 documentation set includes the following titles:

Book Description

Installing and Using

ColdFusion MX

Describes system installation and basic configuration for Microsoft

Windows, Solaris, and Linux. To see this manual, go to http://

www.macromedia.com/go/livedocs_cfmx7docs_installing.

Configuring and

Administering

ColdFusion MX

Part I describes how to manage the ColdFusion environment, including

connecting to your data sources and configuring security for your

applications. Part II describes Verity search tools and utilities that you can

use for configuring the Verity K2 Server search engine, as well as creating,

managing, and troubleshooting Verity collections. To see this manual, go to

www.macromedia.com/go/livedocs_cfmx7docs_configadmin.

ColdFusion MX

Developer’s Guide

Describes how to develop your dynamic web applications, including

retrieving and updating your data, and using structures and forms. This

manual includes two volumes. To see this manual, go to

www.macromedia.com/go/livedocs_cfmx7docs_dev.

Getting Started

Building

ColdFusion MX

Applications

Contains an overview of ColdFusion features and application development

procedures. This manual includes a tutorial that guides you through the

process of developing a sample ColdFusion application. To see this manual

online, go to www.macromedia.com/go/livedocs_cfmx7docs_gs.

8 Introduction:

Viewing online documentation

All ColdFusion MX documentation is available online in HTML and Adobe Acrobat Portable

Document Format (PDF) files. Go to the documentation home page for ColdFusion MX on the

Macromedia website: www.macromedia.com. In addition, you can view the documentation in

LiveDocs, which lets you add comments to pages and view the latest comments added by

Macromedia, by going to www.macromedia.com/go/livedocs_cfmx7docs.

CFML Reference Provides descriptions, syntax, usage, and code examples for all ColdFusion

tags, functions, and variables. This manual includes two volumes. To see

this manual, go to www.macromedia.com/go/

livedocs_cfmx7docs__cfml_reference.

CFML Quick Reference Shows the syntax of ColdFusion tags, functions, and variables in a brief

guide.

Book Description

PART I

Welcome to ColdFusion

Part I provides an introduction to Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7. It defines ColdFusion MX 7

and provides an overview of the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). It also provides generic

database concepts.

The following chapters are included in Part I:

Chapter 1: Introducing ColdFusion MX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Chapter 2: CFML Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Chapter 3: Database Fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

PART I

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