ColdFusion MX Professional Projects

In Chapter 5, "Accessing Databases Using ColdFusion MX," you learned how to work with databases. In this chapter, you'll create a Recruitment System application by using the database concepts you learned in Chapter 5. This project will also use exception handling and error trapping. Before creating a project, first you need to look at the case study for the project. This chapter describes the case study and design of the Recruitment System application for the Smart Stores company.

Smart Stores Recruitment System Application—The Present Scenario

Smart Stores is a fictional department store that purchases various items like garments, perfumes, shoes, CDs, toys, furniture, jewelry, and watches from selected manufacturers all over the world. These items are then sold from Smart Stores' retail outlets. Currently, Smart Stores has 60 retail sales outlets across the United States, and there are 20 regional offices handling sales and logistics.

Smart Stores has approximately 2,500 employees working in different departments, including Finance, Management, Purchasing, Sales, Logistics, and Human Resources. The HR department is always in search of smart employees for various outlets and regional offices. The company has two Human Resource centers, one in New Jersey and the other in Santa Clara, California. These two HR centers handle the complete recruitment process, starting by advertising job vacancies. In the current system, employees in the HR department are facing the following problems:

• The number of applications received for various openings is quite high.

• The applications are collected from all the regional offices, and then data entry is performed at the two HR centers. This process is time-consuming.

• The number of queries regarding placement status received in regional offices and retail sales outlets is quite high.

Because the current recruitment system is inefficient, the company's management decided to modify it. After a thorough discussion, management decided to use the Internet as the communication medium. It also decided that tasks such as adding, deleting, updating, and searching for an applicant's record, which were being performed only at the HR centers, should also be performed at regional offices. To implement this, the Recruitment System application should be a Web application that uses a centralized database.