System information

42 Chapter 4: Lesson 1: Preparing to Build the Sample Application
The following sections explore an overview of each of these application development steps.
Exercise 1: Determining the application functional requirements
Before you can build the sample application, you must understand the functional requirements
that influence its design. The design of the sample application centers around the daily tasks
performed by Compass Travel’s trip coordinators. The following table describes these tasks:
You can derive several functional requirements for the new application from the preceding table.
For example, the sample application must provide the ability to do the following:
• Generate trip listings.
• Find trips based on user-supplied criteria.
• Browse trips.
• Add a new trip.
• Delete an existing trip.
• Edit an existing trip.
• Validate new or updated trips against Compass business rules.
In the lessons that follow, you will build ColdFusion pages to address each of these functional
requirements. The basis for every requirement is the idea of a trip. Before you can build code to
address any of these requirements, you must understand which attributes of a trip are important
to Compass Travel. For this you must determine the data requirements for the application.
Understanding the data requirements is essential to building the proper database to hold the
application data.
3 Design the database for your application by exploring the database tables that will store
the trip information.
4 Develop the ColdFusion application pages.
Trip coordinator task Description
Produce current trip
listing
To help Compass Travel agents take trip reservations on the telephone
and in person, the trip coordinator maintains a list of current trip offerings.
Provide trip information On an ad hoc basis, Compass Travel management asks the trip
coordinator to develop lists of trips that meet specific criteria.
Maintain trip information The trip coordinator is responsible for keeping all trip information up to
date. To do this, the coordinator needs to locate a trip to edit it or delete it.
Additionally, the coordinator must be able to add a new trip.
Ensure the quality of trip
information
The trip coordinator is responsible for periodically browsing the current trip
offerings to ensure that all the information is accurate. Additionally, when
adding a new trip or editing an existing one, the trip coordinator must
ensure that the data adheres to the Compass Travel business rules.
Step Description