Adding database columns in Coldfusion

Question

Hi everyone...
I have a huge problem at work and I have no idea how to fix
it.
-I need to generate a drop-down list.
-This list needs to have one value shown for around 5,000
records from the below data:
-I need to query a database for 3 columns, course_name,
course_num, and section_num
-After querying the DB, I need to add the three colums up to
something like "EXM-1-1"
-Then I need to make a dropdown list (again, about 5000 items
long) with each of these results.
-The types for the 3 columns (respectively) are varchar(7),
varchar(20), and mediumint(7)

Answer 1

freedomflyer wrote:
> That works...well...great! Thanks so much!
> Just a couple of questions....
>
> 1) I thought I had to externally concatenate the strings
by using "&"
You could use the concatenate operator [&] if you would
like to
concatenate strings together into one larger string. I.E.
<cfset
theLargeStr = aSmallStr & "-" & bSmallStr>.
What I did in the previous code was just output three
separate string
variables with two string literals of the '-' character
between them.
Interestingly ColdFusion is very forgiving on how one
concatenates
strings so that often the two following lines are equivalent.
Note the
placement of the pound signs and quotes.
<cfset theLargeStr = aSmallStr & "-" &
bSmalStr>
<cfset theLargeStr = "#aSmallStr#-#bSmalStr#">
I think most people would find the first line a bit cleaner
and clearer
but otherwise they are the same.
> ...It almost seems like
>
#myLongList.aVarchar#-#myLongList.bVarchar#-#myLongList.int#
> would attempt to subtract values. (And yet it works...)
So why does this
> happen? Is it not possible to put a value of, say, 5-3
in the option tags and
> have it display "2" as the option?
<cfoutput>#aVar#-#bVar#<cfoutput>
This output two variables separated by a '-' character.
<cfoutput>#aVar-bVar#</cfoutput>
This would output the difference (subtraction) of aVar and
bVar.
Note the placement of the pound signs this makes all the
difference.
>
> 2) I noticed the <cfoutput/> tags sandwiching my
option tags. Does this mean
> that HTML and CF are both very easily intermeshed?
*_TOO_ easily* according to some detractors of ColdFusion.
Yes CFML is designed to be intermingled into the HTML that it
is
dynamically building.
This can be easily abused and create horribly hard to
understand and
maintain code. So it is always a good practice to not
intermingle
unnecessary business logic processing with the display logic.
But for a
purpose like this, which was to display a dynamic list of
option tags,
this is the way most would write it.