Programming ColdFusion MX, 2nd Edition

Display Techniques

This section focuses on techniques you can use to enhance the display of dynamic data. Some of these techniques include displaying limited record sets, creating dynamic HTML tables with alternating row colors, working with various multicolumn output displays, and browsing records with next/previous. You will also learn several methods for controlling whitespace in dynamic pages in order to optimize page-download times.

Flushing Page Output

A complaint often heard regarding web applications is the amount of time it takes to return data to a user once a page is requested, be it by a form submission or a URL the user clicks on. Often this is due to the large amount of data a particular operation must sift through and return to the user. In situations such as this, it is often desirable to present the user with a “Please Wait” message while their request processes or to provide incremental amounts of data as results from a large query result set become available. ColdFusion lets you handle these tasks with a new tag introduced in Version 5.0 called cfflush. The cfflush tag provides a means to send incremental amounts of data from your ColdFusion server to a user’s browser as they become available.

The first time a cfflush tag is encountered on a page, it sends all the HTTP headers for the request along with any generated content up to the position in the template where the tag is encountered. Successive cfflush tags return any content generated since the previous ...