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:

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.

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:

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.