User Guide

28 Chapter 3 Querying a Database

• Some DBMS vendors use nonstandard SQL syntax (known as a dialect) in their

products. ColdFusion does not validate the SQL in a

cfquery, so you are free to

use any syntax that is supported by your data source. Check your DBMS

documentation for nonstandard SQL usage.

Building Queries

As discussed earlier in this chapter, you build queries using the cfquery tag and SQL.

To query the table:

1 Create a new application page in ColdFusion Studio.

2 Edit the page so that it appears as follows:

<html>

<head>

<title>Employee List</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Employee List</h1>

SELECT FirstName, LastName, Salary, Contract

FROM Employee

</cfquery>

</body>

</html>

3 Save the page as emplist.cfm in myapps under the Web root directory. For

example, the directory path on your machine might be:

C:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\myapps on Windows NT

4 Return to your browser and enter the following URL to view EmpList.cfm:

http://127.0.0.1/myapps/emplist.cfm

5 View the source in the browser.

The ColdFusion Server creates the EmpList data set, but only HTML and text is

sent back to the browser so you just see the heading “Employee List”. To display

the data set on the page, you must code tags and variables to output the data.