Programming instructions

94 Lesson 3 Creating a Main Application Page

Adding navigation buttons to browse database

The drill-down search function developed in the last exercise is very useful when the user

knows some search criteria to enter. Unfortunately, however, flipping back and forth

between the results page and the detail page to navigate through a record set can be

tedious. Moreover, on occasion the trip coordinator might want to browse the Trips

database just to check for anomalies or to become familiar with its contents. In these

cases, the user does not know the criteria to search for in advance.

For example, an anomaly may exist on any trip record, the trip coordinator would have

no idea what search criteria to specify on the search form to find these problem records.

To solve this problem, the browse function gives the coordinator the ability to navigate

sequentially through the trips table using the single record trips display. The following

figure shows the navigation buttons. The label under each button describes which row to

display relative to the currently displayed row:

Exercise: adding navigation buttons to the Trip Detail page

In this exercise, you use the HTML

form and input tags to add the navigational buttons

to the Trips Detail page.

To add navigation:

1 Open the tripdetail.cfm in the my_app directory in your editor.

2 To implement the trip navigation buttons, insert the following code between the

</table> and</cfoutput> tags in the tripdetail.cfm file:

</form>

Note: Notice that the current trip record ID (tripID) is hidden within the form code.

This is desirable because the action page must have the current record ID in order to

build the query that navigates to the appropriate record in the trips database table.