Dreamweaver Article

Building a contact management application using Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox – Part 3: Improving the contact management application

In this tutorial you will use Developer Toolbox features to build a web application for managing the contacts of a person or company. Multiple companies or individuals can be created, each with one or more contacts. The application will let you:

• Display a full list of companies and their corresponding contacts
• Add a new company to the database
• Delete an existing company, together with all associated contacts
• Add a new company and its main contact simultaneously
• Add, modify or delete contacts for a company
• Validate entered e-mail addresses and phone numbers
• Send automatic birthday greetings by e-mail

This tutorial contains three parts, starting from the basic functionality, and enriching it with different features:

1. Add, Edit and Delete Companies and Contacts (Part 1)
2. Validate Contact Information (Part 2)
3. Improve the Contact Management Application (Part 3)

In this last part of the tutorial you will enhance the web-application already created by adding features that will save time and make it more user-friendly and interactive.

The following topics of the tutorial are optional, as they only add features to the already finished application. They will teach you how to:

• Add a base contact together with the company's addition to the database
• Enhance the company add form so that more contacts can be added right away
• Keep in touch with contacts by automatically sending birthday greetings
• View the quantity of each company's contacts by displaying their number aside the company name, in the main listings

This section contains the following topics:

• Insert both company and main contact
• Add more contacts after inserting the company
• Send an automatic birthday greeting
• Display the number of contacts per company

The estimated completion time for this section is about 40 minutes. It depends on your authoring knowledge with Adobe Dreamweaver and Developer Toolbox.

The estimated completion time for all parts of this tutorial (considering the initial planning, the mandatory sections and the proposed improvements) is about 100 minutes. It also depends on your authoring knowledge with Adobe Dreamweaver and Developer Toolbox.

It's recommended that you follow all tutorial parts in the intended order to avoid potential problems.

Requirements

In order to complete this tutorial, you need to install the following software and files:

Dreamweaver CS3

• Try
• Buy

Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox

• Try
• Buy

Adobe Extension Manager

• Download

Sample files:

• contact_management_application.zip (ZIP, 1K)

System requirements:

• You have installed one of the following web servers: Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.1 (Windows XP Professional) or 6.0 (Windows 2003), Apache 1.3.x or 2.0, or the built-in web server in ColdFusion 6.1 or later.
• You have defined a Dreamweaver site with a testing server or remote server running ColdFusion 6.1 or later, PHP 4.4.0 or later, ASP 5.5 or later. Check out How to define a site in Dreamweaver (TechNote 14028) for instructions on correctly defining your site.
• You have a working database connection from Dreamweaver to any supported database for your preferred server model.
• If using ColdFusion, make sure the CreateObject function is enabled. You can enable and disable this function using the ColdFusion Administrator.
• For the e-mail to be correctly sent, you also need to be able to use a SMTP server.

Prerequisite knowledge:

I would recommend that you are familiar with Dreamweaver CS3 Recordsets. Working with Server Behaviors will also be helpful.

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