Lesson 7: Validating Data to Enforce Business Rules

In this lesson, you will create a page for the trip coordinator to add new trip offerings and update existing trips. In addition, you will add logic to validate that data entered so that it complies with Compass Travel business rules.

This lesson contains the following exercises:

Exercise 1: Using an HTML form to collect data

Exercise 2: Creating a simple action page

Exercise 3: About data validation

Exercise 4: Providing server-side validation

Exercise 5: Validating data on the client using ColdFusion form tags

Exercise 6: Dynamically populating the list of event types

Exercise 7: Validating the existence of the trip photo file

ColdFusion tags and functions introduced in this lesson

The following table describes the ColdFusion tags and functions that you use in this lesson to enhance the ColdFusion application:

Element

Type

Description

cfform

Tag

Builds a form with CFML custom control tags that provide more functionality than standard HTML form input elements.

cfinput

Tag

Use inside the cfform tag to place radio buttons, check boxes, or text boxes. Provides input validation for the specified control type.

cfselect

Tag

Use inside the cfform tag. Lets you construct a drop-down list form control. You can populate the drop-down list from a query, or use the HTML option tag. You also use option elements to populate lists. The syntax for the option tag is the same as for its HTML counterpart.

FileExists

Function

Returns True if the file specified in the argument exists, False if it doesn’t exist.