ColdFusion: Creating Database-driven Web Sites, Level 3

Course description

Overview: This course is designed for the non-programmer who wants to learn Web application development with ColdFusion. Students taking this course should be experienced with HTML, Internet concepts, SQL fundamentals, and database fundamentals. This course introduces students to the syntax, functions, tags, and possible development solutions they're likely to encounter as they begin to develop ColdFusion applications.

Prerequisites: ColdFusion: Creating Database-driven Web Sites, Level 1 (and all of its prerequisites), ColdFusion: Creating Database-driven Web Sites, Level 2  or equivalent knowledge. 

Performance-based objectives

Lesson objectives help students become comfortable with the course, and also provide a means to evaluate learning. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

*           Understand and implement the ColdFusion application framework.

*           Set and access global variables.

*           Create a login page that authenticates users and handles common errors.

*           Manage clients with cookies.

*           Collect user preferences to display customized content.

*           Create a previous/next search application and cached queries.

*           Create conditional statements with CFSWITCH

Course content

Lesson 1: The ColdFusion Application Framework

Designing with the application framework

Exploring the Application.cfm template

Exploring Persistent variables

Setting and Referencing Global variables

The CFAPPLICATION tag

Lesson 2: Creating a Login Application

Establishing Basic Security

Using Cookies

Inserting New Users

Lesson 3: Displaying Personalized Content

Gathering User Preferences

Creating Cookies Dynamically

Logging in users Automatically

Lesson 4: Creating Previous/Next Record Sets

Browsing Previous/Next Record Sets

Creating the Application Logic

Determining the Number of Remaining Records

Creating the Next Link

Creating the Previous Link

Lesson 5: Design and Performance Considerations

Caching Query Data

Preventing User Error

Exploring CGI variables

Lesson 6: Conditional Processing with CFSWITCH

Displaying the Average Rating of Each Title

CFCASE and CFDEFAULTCASE

Learning More about ColdFusion Development

Appendix A: Configuration Whitepaper

Appendix B: Installation Whitepaper