User Guide

Table Of Contents
470 Chapter 20: Accessing and Retrieving Data
</cfoutput>
</body>
</html>
2.
Save the file and view it in your web browser:
A list of employees appears in the browser, with each line displaying one row of data.
Note: You might need to refresh your browser to see your changes.
You created a ColdFusion application page that retrieves and displays data from a database. At
present, the output is raw and needs formatting. For more information, see “Introduction to
Retrieving and Formatting Data” on page 609.
Reviewing the code
The results of the query appear on the page. The following table describes the highlighted code
and its function:
Query output notes and considerations
When outputting query results, keep the following guidelines in mind:
A cfquery must retrieve data before the cfoutput tag can display its results. Although you can
include both on the same page, Macromedia recommends that you put queries in ColdFusion
components and output the results on a separate page. For more information, see Chapter 10,
“Building and Using ColdFusion Components,” on page 201.
To output data from all the records of a query, specify the query name by using the query
attribute in the
cfoutput tag.
Columns must exist and be retrieved to the application to output their values.
Inside a cfoutput block that uses a cfquery attribute, you can prefix the query variables with
the name of the query; for example,
Emplist.FirstName.
As with other attributes, surround the query attribute value with double-quotation marks (").
As with any variables that you reference for output, surround column names with number
signs (#) to tell ColdFusion to output the columns current values.
Add a <br> tag to the end of the variable references so that ColdFusion starts a new line for
each row that the query returns.
Code Description
<cfoutput query="EmpList">
Displays information retrieved in the EmpList query.
#EmpList.FirstName#,
#EmpList.LastName#,
#EmpList.Salary#,
#EmpList.Contract#
Displays the value of the FirstName, LastName, Salary, and
Contract fields of each record, separated by commas and
spaces.
<br>
Inserts a line break (go to the next line) after each record.
</cfoutput>
Ends the cfoutput block.