User Guide

77
CHAPTER 7
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.