Publishing Dynamic Data

A Web application page is different from a static Web page because it can publish data dynamically. This can involve querying databases, connecting to LDAP or mail servers, and leveraging COM and DCOM objects to retrieve, update, insert, and delete data at runtime - as your users interact with pages in their browsers.

ColdFusion Express

ColdFusion Express allows you to build queries that retrieve data from, insert data into, or update data in any database that supports the Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) specification.

To build a query, you will need to use:

ColdFusion data sources
The CFQUERY tag
SQL commands

During this chapter, you will build a query to retrieve data from the HRExpress.mdb, an Access database that was delivered with ColdFusion Express. In subsequent chapters in this book, you will insert and update data in this database.

To see how ColdFusion application pages retrieve data from databases, sample this training snippet.