Programming instructions

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.