One of the first tags encountered by most ColdFusion developers are the and tags. Beginners can be lead to make tragically inefficient use of these tags, but so can more experienced developers. This session will start with the basic mechanics of a query based output loop. From there we will explore writing better queries to cram more information into them and getting more out of the output loop -- all the while being mindful of tradeoffs between efficiency of code and convenience of maintenance. Although this is a session that should be attended by beginner ColdFusion developers, we will cover material that may spark new ideas for old hands as well. Key features of this session will include: ordering queries and using the cfoutput "group" attribute. discovering the inneficiency of nesting a query inside of a loop joining tables to pull more information into a query a discussion of when to break the "rules" using the cfcontent tag to build complex reports writing sql with subqueries to pull even more information into a query using query of queries review of other tags that return query objects accessing individual rows inside a query object All examples are built around a very simple issue tracking database that was created solely for the purpose of this presentation. All code and the database used for this presentation will be available with the presentation materials.
About Gerry Gurevich
Gerry Gurevich is an experienced ColdFusion developer and application architect with over 12 years of web application experience. He has worked on a variety of projects and lead teams of developers as a contractor to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Currently he works directly for the EPA as technical lead of the HERO database system.
Earlier gyrations in his career included time as an engineer researching microwave antennas, owner and manager of an RV Park in the Washington, DC area, high school math teacher, educational researcher, and writer of poetry, ficction, and non-fiction. None of that can make him happier than writing code that works.