| In this example, we are going to build a menu page to help users list employees by department. To do this, we will need a menu of departments for the user to choose from. When the user chooses a specific department, we will pass the DepartmentID number as a URL variable. We will then use that URL variable in our WHERE clause to pull employees from just that department. -
Open your text editor and type the code shown in Listing 3.2, or you can open the EmployeeMenu.cfm file from the CompletedFiles\Examples\Step02 folder. Listing 3.2 EmployeeMenu.cfm <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Employee Search Page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H2>List Employees</H2> <P>List <A HREF="EmployeeList.cfm">all employees</A></P> <P>List Employees By Department<BR> <!--- send departmentID number as a URL variable ---> <A HREF="EmployeesByDept.cfm?Dept=2">Marketing</A><BR> <A HREF="EmployeesByDept.cfm?Dept=4">Operations</A><BR> <A HREF="EmployeesByDept.cfm?Dept=1">Sales</A><BR> <A HREF="EmployeesByDept.cfm?Dept=3">Technology</A><BR> </P> </BODY> </HTML> -
Save this file as EmployeeMenu.cfm into you Examples\Step03 folder. -
Make a copy of the EmployeeList.cfm template and rename it EmployeesByDept.cfm. -
At the top of the EmployeesByDept.cfm template, change the comments and query to the following: <!--- retrieve employees from a specific department ---> <CFQUERY NAME="qStaffList" DATASOURCE="Staff"> SELECT FirstName, LastName, Extension, DepartmentID FROM Employees WHERE DepartmentID = #URL.Dept# ORDER BY LastName </CFQUERY> We will use the URL.Dept variable that has been passed from the EmployeeMenu.cfm page in our WHERE clause to restrict the results to a single department. -
Save your changes and browse to the EmployeeMenu.cfm page. -
Choose the Sales link. Your results should look similar to Figure 3.11. Figure 3.11. Search results by department.
|