Basic Questions

[topry]

I recently inherited a Coldfusion application and while I have experience in other languages, I have some very basic questions on CF.

1) Recommendations on any third party books to help me come up to speed on this environment.

2) The application I inherited uses MS SQL 7 on the backend and most of the pages are very simplistic doing nothing more than data display and simple data entry. I suppose I am spoiled of the current IDE's available in Visual Studio, but to date, I have found it a bit difficult to follow the logic (or lack thereof) in some of the pages.

For example:
One page executes a simple Select query and then populates two drop-down list controls with data from two different fields from the same recordset. (ie Stock Ticker Symbols in one list and Company names in another). I would like to tie these two objects together, such that when you select an item in one list the corresponding field is displayed in the other. Any hints on how to approach this?

3) The server is currently running version 4, but Macromedia is now selling version 5 of the development environment (and 4.5 of server) and version 5 is the only one they sell. If I am using version 5 to fix / modify this existing application is it likely to cause me problems running it on version 4 of the server? Assuming I stay away from tags not supported in version 4, I was mostly concerned that parameters / other functionality may be effected and the resulting pages would fail to work?

Thanks in advance.

 

[topry]

Follow-up to my own post:
It would appear that I would use JavaScript and the Select object OnChange event and then make a query based upon the selected value, setting the other object to the query result.

If so, then I now need to determine how to call a CFQuery from the OnChange event and set the other objects value.

If there is a better way to do this, please advise.

 

[Silvano]

1) I recommend Arman Danesh/Kristin Aileen Motlagh - Mastering ColdFusion 4.5; it covers the most basic to most advanced concepts of CF, and you'll have it all in one place; you'll get a lot of scripts, ready to go and leads that will help you get more informations about the topic with no effort at all

2)those two field you are trying to tie together, they have to be related somehow (e.g. you select to display ticker symbol in one field and then you'll display company name in another, where company ID equals ticker symbol ID); in cf you can join tables or work with table relations;

example how to join tables in cf:

<query name=&quot;queryName&quot; datasource=&quot;dbn&quot;>
SELECT table1.ticker, table1.mainID, table2.companyName, table2.mainID
FROM table1 INNER JOIN table2
ON table1.mainID = table2.mainID
</query>

having said that, to output this, all you have to do is:

<output query=&quot;queryName&quot;>
<tr>
<td>#ticker#</td><td>#companyName#</td>
</tr>
</query>

there is more than one way to solve this in cf, this is just an example

3) I have no direct experience with v5; I have 4.5 and it serves me well; for 5, I preffer to wait a while until they work all bugs out
you can go here for more info on this topic:

http://www.allaire.com/Documents/cf4docs.cfm

Sylvano
dsylvano@hotmail.com

&quot;every and each day when I learn something new is a small victory...&quot;

 

[Silvano]

follow-up to your follow-up,

you can not cf query direct, but you can use java event handlers to call other cfm files where you have queries to be executed Sylvano
dsylvano@hotmail.com

&quot;every and each day when I learn something new is a small victory...&quot;

 

[topry]

Thank you for the reply.

I have ordered some books and have been doing some additional reading on the Web and now have the basic concepts of how the ISAPI DLL processes the requests. I was under the original misconception that you could mix CF tags in an HTML document, but now see that it is more akin to ASP than I originally thought.

Since this app is for a closed system with clients running only IE, I am hoping that I can use VBScript for all of the logic processing (business rules) or place them in a more traditional middle-tier DLL.

I don't suppose you have gone through the upgrade process of a server from version 4 to 4.5 and can advise of any issues or problems that arose during that process?

Regards,

Tim

 

[Silvano]

I can only give you my experience that I've had few months ago; back then, I was running win98, PWS, ColdFusion 4.0 and Norton Personal Firewall 2000; I am mentioning and firewall here because to install all those things and have no problems, my experience is that you have to install os first, firewall second, web server third, and cf server as last component;
When i tried to upgrade to cfserver 4.5, i've had no problems, but few months ago, I have done something I shouldn't have - I tried to upgrade firewall 2000 to 2001; result: all hell broke loose.
not only that I wasn't able to install fw2001, I wasn't able to go back to 2000 neither; web server started messing up, I wasn't able to view documents in the browser, for some reason, OS wouldn't let me uninstall PWS or cf server(list just goes on, and on, and on...), it was nightmare...

long story short - I reinstall everything (including OS), and I used this as opportunity to upgrade OS to win 2000 pro, firewall 2001, IIS 5, and cf server 4.5 (in this order), and everything works like a dream since

I didn't mean to scare you with this story, I am just sharing my experience, so maybe save you some trouble you might have; to this day, I don't know what went wrong back then; only acceptable explanation I might have is that if firewall is re-installed over servers, it can be a source for major problems

conclusion: do not do any upgrade unless you know how will that affect your system; go to allaire site, check all documentation available they have there, and then find all documentation available on your own, when you are done with all that, come here and talk with other cf users; you'll find out that a lot of people here are willing and ready to help you

Good luck to you
Sylvano
dsylvano@hotmail.com

&quot;every and each day when I learn something new is a small victory...&quot;