Working with dynamic data

A web application page is different from a static web page because it can publish data dynamically. This can involve querying databases, connecting to LDAP or mail servers, and leveraging COM, DCOM, CORBA, or Java objects to retrieve, update, insert, and delete data at run time—as your users interact with pages in their browsers.

For ColdFusion developers, the term data source can refer to different types of structured content accessible locally or across a network. You can query websites, LDAP servers, POP mail servers, and documents in a variety of formats. Most commonly though, a database drives your applications, and for this discussion a data source means the entry point from ColdFusion to a database.

Here, you build a query to retrieve data from the cfdocexamples data source.

To query a database, use:

  • ColdFusion data sources

  • The cfquery tag

  • SQL commands