2007 Scorpio Auto-Suggest Control
Last week Tim and I showed off some of the Ajax functionality that we are working on for the upcoming ColdFusion Scorpio. One of the controls we demonstrated was an auto-suggest control implemented as an extension to the existing <cfinput>l tag. As demonstrated, the tag can be used in two ways. It can use a hard coded list, like this:
2 name="fruit"
3 autosuggest="apple,banana,lemon,lime,mango,orange,peach,pear">
Of course, the list need not be static, it could be programmatically generated at runtime as needed. This is an ideal option for shorter lists.
For longer lists the suggestions can be populated via asynchronous calls back to a ColdFusion Component on the server after a delay in typing. The syntax would look something like this:
2 name="fruit"
3 autosuggest="cfc:fruit.getFruit({cfautosuggestvalue})">
This points to a CFC named fruit.cfc in the same folder and invoked a method named getFruit() passing the current field value as an argument. The invoked method receives that argument as a string, does whatever processing it needs (perhaps using it in a
Of course, all of this is subject to change, but you get the idea.
2007 Ryan Favro's Flex Pizza Builder
Ordering a pizza seems to be a popular example use case when building applications. Close to a decade ago, when I was first teaching the "FastTrack to ColdFusion" course, students needed help brushing up on basic HTML form functionality and how to work with the submitted results. So, I had them create a "let's order pizza for lunch" form, which ended up becoming part of the core course.
But Ryan Favro has done a much more impressive job with his Flex Pizza Builder, a Flex application with a really nice data selection interface, a very engaging display, and a cool mashup driven backend. Check it out!