Programming instructions

62 Lesson 2 Writing Your First ColdFusion Application
Using a web page to list trips
To help Compass Travel agents take trip reservations by telephone and in person, the trip
coordinator maintains a list of current trip offerings. Years ago, the coordinator would
type the list and fax it to the various Compass Travel offices in an effort to keep everyone
informed. When Compass Travel built an intranet accessible by all offices, the trip
coordinator added the following HTML web page to the site:
Each time the Trip List HTML page is rendered in a browser, it displays the same web
page. Since the page always shows an identical trip list, it is considered a static web page.
You should only use static web pages when you are creating a page that is not likely to
change often.
Converting to a dynamic web page
Using the static web page approach, the Trip Coordinator needs to modify all the web
pages that reference trip lists when trips are added, deleted, or trip names are changed.
This manual process of updating each web page can lead to inaccurate or untimely
information. Luckily, since Compass Travel has built a database that contains a list of
trips, you can build a more accurate and timely solution for the trip coordinator. To
accomplish this, you must understand how to issue a SQL SELECT statement to retrieve
the data from the Trips table in the Compass Travel database.
Understanding basic SQL SELECT statements
The SQL SELECT statement retrieves columns of data from a database. The tabular
result is stored in a result table (called the record set).
You use the following SELECT statement to retrieve information from a table:
SELECT column_name(s) FROM table_name