Saving details

Question

Greetings all, im half way through making a prototype of my
fitness program, the content and things like that are fine and even
how to do the scripting inside it should be no real problem,
basically the program should be able to save detail like the
obvious thing, name, age, username, password etc, and iv already
received help on how to do passwords, but its more a case of where
the details get stored, i was originally planning on using the
getPrefs etc to do it, but after speaking with my supervisor i was
told to look into either fileIO or using a web server to store the
details, then the program could call the data from there and for
example, check if a users log in name matched their password etc.
the main problem is that im useless when it comes to server stuff
and that side of the internet, im willing to learn as i think that
side of it would make my program more robust, but i also dont want
to get in over my head.
i was wondering what method you would recommend for this kind
of procedure and possibly just as importantly if you know of any
websites/books with tutorials to follow on how to do it.
as a smaller but less important notes, what would be the
easiest method of making drop down menus, iv checked the forum
before, downloaded buddymenu and something else but iv not tried
them yet, is there a very basic way of doing it without plug ins?
and finally can director email people? for example if a user
forgets their password could it email them?
thanks greatly for any help or advice anyone can give
Moza

Answer 1

For storing data on the web you may want to look at the
following post, you may also want to investigate the v12 xtra. That
having been said, at least in my opinion, storing user data on the
web, while it may sound like a cool idea, is going to be vastly
more complex (read time consuming and expensive) vs storing data
locally using something like FileIO or BuddyAPI.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=187&threadid=1341973
For emailing: gotoNetPage("mailto:[email protected]") is easy
and doesn’t require any xtras but it spawns a blank browser
window in addition to the email client which you might not like.
BuddyAPI’s baOpenURL will do the same thing without spawning
the browser window. I’ve also used DLLbinder with a MAPI dll
which is cool but only works if you’re 100% certain your user
base will have a MAPI compliant email client (ie: Outlook, Outlook
Express, and maybe some clones). Note however, in all of these case
all you’re doing is launching the email client and spawning
an email form and possibly pre-populating some of the fields
… which means you’ll be showing the password in the
message body, what you are probably looking for is a transparent
email which none of the solutions above can implement*…
To implement the familiar emailed password you see on some
websites I think you’re either going to need an xtra (if
Director is emailing) or a server script if the data is stored
remotely. For a Director xtra solution I found directEmail easy to
use and capable but there are others. If you are using an ASP
server solution you can read up on CDONTS and/or CDOSYS for email.
You don’t need a lot of ASP experience to get something like
that to work, I put together a project a few years back where
Director sent data to an ASP server and the server constructed the
email and sent it out. I got most of the ASP code I needed from
Google searches. If your server is PHP or Cold Fusion I can’t
help you much except to say there are probably direct equivalents
to the ASP components.
*Strictly speaking the MAPI solution can email transparently
but it throws all sorts of security warnings so it’s not very
useful in that capacity.