User Guide

Working with Action Pages 45

Working with Action Pages

A ColdFusion action page is just like any other application page except that you can

use the form variables that are passed to it from an associated form. The following

sections describe how to create effective action pages.

Processing form variables on action pages

The action page gets a form variable for every form control that contains a value

when the form is submitted.

Note

If multiple controls have the same name, one form variable is passed to the action

page. It contains a comma-delimited list.

A form variable’s name is the name that you assigned to the form control on the form

page. Refer to the form variable by name within tags, functions, and other

expressions on an action page.

Because Form variables extend beyond the local page—their scope is the action

page—prefix them with “Form.” to explicitly tell ColdFusion that you are referring to

a form variable. For example the following code references the LastName form

variable for output on an action page:

#Form.LastName#

</cfoutput>

Dynamically generating SQL statements

As you have already learned, you can retrieve a record for every employee in a

database table by composing a query like this:

SELECT FirstName, LastName, Contract

FROM Employee

</cfquery>

But when you want to return information about employees that match user search

criteria, you use the SQL WHERE clause with a SQL SELECT statement to compare a

value against a character string field. When the WHERE clause is processed, it filters

the query data based on the results of the comparison.

For example, to return employee data for only employees with the last name of

Smith, you build a query that looks like this:

SELECT FirstName, LastName, Contract

FROM Employee

WHERE LastName = "Smith"

</cfquery>