Getting Started Building ColdFusion MX Applications

Lesson 3
Creating a Main Application Page

In this lesson you will enhance the Compass Travel Trip Maintenance application. The exercises in this lesson guide you through the following steps:

• Transforming the search facility that you built in the previous lesson into a drill-down facility for trip queries
• Creating a Trip Detail page to display complete details of a trip
• Implementing a link from Trip Detail page to the search facility
• Converting the Trip Detail page into the main application page by including buttons for navigating to other pages and browsing trip records in the database

This lesson explains how to do the following tasks:

• Use URLEncodedFormat to safely link the Search Results page to the Trip Detail page.
• Use the DateFormat and DollarFormat functions to properly format date and dollar variables.
• Use the MOD function and a query variable to properly alternate the back color of rows in the Trip Search Results table.

ColdFusion tags and functions introduced in this lesson

The following table identifies the ColdFusion tags and functions that you use in this lesson to enhance the sample ColdFusion application:

Element	Type	Brief description
IsDefined	Function	Evaluates a string value to determine whether it represents an existing variable. Returns True if the variable is found, False if not found.
DollarFormat	Function	Returns a number as a string formatted with two decimal places, thousands separator, and dollar sign. If the specified number is negative, parentheses are used.
DateFormat	Function	Returns a formatted date/time value. If no mask is specified, DateFormat returns the date value in the dd-mmm-yy format. DateFormat supports dates that have the U.S. date format.
URLEncodedFormat	Function	Converts a text string into a string that can safely be used in a URL.

Copyright © 2002, Macromedia Inc. All rights reserved.

Comments