Programming instructions

Using a web page to list trips 65

the Trip List page presented earlier in this lesson. In this example, you use cfquery to

return all the trip names found in the tripName column within the Compass Travel Trips

table. To use the SQL SELECT statement to dynamically retrieve this information, you

must execute the SQL SELECT statement between the

cfquery start and end tags as

follows:

SELECT tripName FROM trips

</cfquery>

Displaying the query result using cfoutput

In Chapter 2, you learned that the ColdFusion

cfoutput tag is an easy mechanism to

display literal text and the contents of variables. Additionally, the

cfoutput tag

significantly simplifies displaying the results of queries. When used to display the results

from a query, the

cfoutput tag automatically loops through the record set for you. You

simply specify the name of the query in the QUERY attribute of the

cfoutput tag:

All the code between the cfoutput start and end tags is the output code block. The

output code block executes repeatedly, once for each row in the record set. However, if

the query returns no rows, ColdFusion skips the code contained in the output code

block.

...output code block...

</cfoutput>

Displaying the column contents from the SQL statement

In CFML you surround variables with pound signs (#) to display their contents using the

cfoutput tag. You also use this approach with column names specified in the SELECT

statement of a

cfquery. For instance, when you want to display the trip names from the

SQL query, you would simply use

#tripName# within the output code block.

#tripname#

</cfoutput>

For additional information about using SQL with cfquery and cfoutput, see

Developing ColdFusion MX Applications with CFML.