Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1: Getting Started

Working with Ajax

All of the controls used thus far have embedded data (queries, lists, and so on) inside of the controls themselves. That works in many situations, but consider the following scenarios.

What if your auto-suggest values are being populated by a table that contains thousands of entries? You don’t want to load all of these entries into a list in the control itself. For starters, that will increase the page size significantly and seriously affect performance, but also, you don’t want to show your user that many options. What you really want is no data at all in the auto-suggest control; when the user types some text and pauses, you want your application to send that text to ColdFusion, which then returns the relevant auto-suggest ...