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Collin Tobin

Collin Tobin

Principal QA Engineer

Dean Harmon

Dean Harmon

Adobe

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Getting Familiar with the New CFREPORT Tag Syntax
  3. Introducing the ColdFusion Report Builder
  4. Building a Sample Report
  5. Building a Query for Your Report in the Query Builder
  6. Formatting Your Report
  7. Browsing Your Report
Created:
7 February 2005
User Level:
Beginner
Products:
Coldfusion

Building Reports with ColdFusion MX 7

Reporting is one of the most common tasks developers have faced since the beginning of the IT revolution. In the past, Macromedia ColdFusion developers did not have many choices for easily creating reports and integrating them with their applications. They either had to leave the comfort of using ColdFusion and use a third-party solution or write CFML to generate HTML layouts—a solution that involved writing a lot of CFML code to read data from database, slice and dice the data, and generate HTML output.

Doing that kind of work can be tedious, repetitive, and just plain boring. Even after all that hard work, the final result can be less than optimal. Because HTML has no notion of page breaks, page headers, and footers, the results seldom look very good when the browser sends a report to the printer.

In ColdFusion 7, the ColdFusion engineering team has created a reporting feature to help liberate you from such tedious tasks. Now you can spend more time developing dynamic applications and less time worrying about whether or not it will print well.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

ColdFusion MX 7

Tutorials and sample files:

Note: This ZIP file contains the sample files to build your first report. If you installed ColdFusion MX 7 without the sample applications, run the installer again and select the Sample Applications option during the installation process.

Prerequisite knowledge:

Previous ColdFusion knowledge is helpful but not necessary

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About the authors

Collin Tobin joined Macromedia in 2001. He is currently a principal quality assurance engineer for ColdFusion. Previously he worked at Gtriad as a web developer.
Dean Harmon has been with Macromedia since 2001. Originally he was on the Visual Tools team developing HomeSite before transitioning to ColdFusion. He enjoys creating and playing video games and spending time with his wife and three children.