ColdFusion MX: CFForms and Back-End Administration part 1

ColdFusion MX: CFForms and Back-End Administration (part 1 of 2)

In the last article we began to build a web application using forms to insert records into a MySQL database.  The concept was simple, we had potential customers that were interested in a vacation from our OKCTravel.com website and they used a form to have their information and interests stored in a database.  I gave an overview on HTML forms as well as the SQL for an insert statement and how to orchestrate a “form page, action page” type of application.

In this article we’d like to expand a little on our forms by introducing CFForms using the <cfform> tag.  Without giving away all of its secrets, ColdFusion will parse your page and create valid JavaScript routines to handle some very common client side validation of your forms.  This is great because end-users will be prompted with JavaScript alert boxes of the things that are incorrect on their form which saves them from having to submit the form to the server to do the checking. 

Here are the topics that we’re going to cover in part 1 of this article:

• <cfform>
• <cfinput>
• Server-Side vs. Client-Side Validation

These topics will give us a chance to explore everything there is to offer about forms and client-side validation in addition to building out our back-end administration (in part 2).  This article will not cover security just yet.  We’re going to build the framework and a working application and perhaps in the next article we’ll discuss securing our application, but by the end of this article series you’ll have a completed framework for your entire website.  When you read this article, don’t forget to grab the source code too – it’s all included just for you!

ColdFusion MX: Forms

In the previous articles we did a lot of code reuse through many of the tags and devices that ColdFusion gives us in ColdFusion MX: Reusing Code.  That is a bit of an overview on all the things that we can use as a developer to help us architect a great web application.  Now we get to use what is commonly the first thing that makes a web application – Forms.  Forms are the essential part of every website it seems.  In a web application we use a form to collect data from the user, use the form to display editable data from a database back to a user or insert data into the database from the user.

In this article we’d like to build a form application that will collect contact information from a user that is interested travelling to some exotic location.  We’d like to store that data in a database and use things like server-side validation on the form data the user supplies.

We’re going to work with ColdFusion MX and explore the following tasks:

• HTML Forms
• The Database
• ColdFusion & Forms
• Conditional Processing
• <cflocation>

These topics will give us a chance to explore everything there is to explore about forms from the standpoint of collecting data from a user and inserting into a database.  This will be essential to other upcoming articles when we want to reverse the process by taking information back out of a database and putting them into forms for a user to insert, update or even delete database data.

How to validate forms with VBScript Part 1

Introduction

For those of us that lean towards VBScript rather than JavaScript, form validation can be just as rewarding, well functional using VBScript.

As with all scripting languages there always seems to be many ways of achieving the same result so I picked the most simple and logical methods of validating form fields.

When to do the validating

The usual time and place to validate your form data is when the user has completed a form and is ready to submit that data for processing. Of course there are times when validation needs to take place before the user gets that far but we will cover that later on.

As a general rule, we will perform our validation when submission occurs and either stop the process if part of our validation criteria has not been met or let the process continue if everything is as we want.

So the trigger for our validation event will be on Submission or in VBScript language onSubmit (See how friendly VBScript can be?)