Macromedia Studio 8 [Electronic resources] : Training from the Source نسخه متنی

Preparing the ColdFusion Pages

In this task, you'll prepare the dante_quiz_login.cfm page and the dante_quiz_questions.cfm page. You'll complete the third pagedante_quiz_results.cfmin Lesson 16.

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Return to the Dante site home page.

The third line is supposed to be blank; that's where you'll add the form in a moment.

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The code &nbsp; represents a non-breaking space, and was inserted by Dreamweaver to give content to the paragraph you created for the blank line. As you'll recall, it's considered ba217 form to have tags that lack content, such as opening and immediately closing <p></p> tags. The non-breaking space is invisible, so it doesn't mess up your pagebut it's technically content, so th218 is still well formed.

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This step creates the basic functionality of the form. Now all the form needs is a field to enable the user to enter her or his username, and a Submit button so she or he can submit the form.

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ColdFusion's Flash forms not only provide elegantly simple design and layout tools, but they also give you other useful capabilities. When you check Required, ColdFusion will mark the field with a red asterisk to indicate that the field is required. When you set Validate to email, the form will know that it must contain a properly formed email address. The Validate at value tells ColdFusion when to check both the existence and format of a value in this required field. By setting the value to onSubmit, you've chosen to have the browser check when the form is submitted.

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The form is now ready for use.

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It's easy to forget to Put files when you're finished working on them, so get in the habit of putting files just before you close them.

As before, creating the binding tells Dreamweaver how to find data that you expect to be available to the page.

You'll dynamically output the username after the colon in the first line, and you'll insert the Flash movie in the second line.

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As before, Dreamweaver writes a <cfoutput> tag into the code. At runtime, ColdFusion will replace <cfoutput>#form.username#</cfoutput> with the email address entered into the form on dante_quiz_login.cfm.

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This step inserts the Flash movie into the page, but it doesn't yet insert the username variable Flash movie.

Flash has numerous options for sending data in and out. One of the simplest is to pass the variable in as a part of the request for the movie. When you insert a Flash movie int228, you provide the URL specifying where the movie is located.

If you look at the code, you'll see the Flash movie's URL referenced twice. Inserting Flash movies int228 pages requires a bit of redundancy, because Internet Explorer deals with media players like the Flash player differently than Netscape and other browsers. Specifically, th218 includes both the <object> and <embed> tags, which are used to insert special media files into browsers. Both tags require that you specify the URL pointing to the plug-in file (in this case, a Flash SWF).

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You can append namevalue pairs to these URLs. When you do, those variables are available in the main timeline of the Flash movie. Thus, if you wanted to pass the variable pairing username=yuki@sheepman.com into your Flash movie, the URL for the <object> and <embed> tags that insert the Flash movie would look like this:

flash/dante_quiz.swf?username=yuki@sheepman.com

The question mark separates the file from the variable(s). In this case, only one namevalue pairing follows. The only catch is that you don't know the value in advance; you'll need to capture the username entered into the form. This problem can also be resolved with the ever-useful <cfoutput> tag.

"flash/dante_quiz.swf?username=<cfoutput>#form.username#</cfoutput>"

The <cfoutput> block will be resolved before the page is sent back to the browser, so by the time the Flash movie is requested, the correct data will already exist and be inserted into the Flash movie.

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You're ready to test this portion of the pages/movie.

The second page, dante_quiz_questions.cfm, should load, and the Flash movie with it.

The username variable should be resolved in both the regular page and the Flash movie.