Coldfusion 8's CFGRID

One of the tags to receive an upgrade in CF8 is the CFGRID tag. I can honestly say that I have never had a need to use this tag in the past although for some I can see that it 'could' have been useful.

The added support comes in the form of: type="html",bind,bindOnLoad,pageSize,prefesrbPageOnSort,stripeRows,stripeRowColor.

Lets focus for a minute on the new bind attribute. This attribute allows you to specify an expression to fill the grids contents. This expression can come in three flavors: You can bind directly to a CFC, a javascript function, or additionaly a URL.

The old restriction on the cfgrid is still in place, that being that it has to live within the bounds of a CFFORM tag, that's a small price to pay for ajax functionality right?

So here is a code snippet of the cfgrid in action:

Nothing too fancy other than the bind right? lets look at that a little closer.

Here is what it looks like using the default styling:

You should immediately notice the bar at the bottom. This additional little functionality provides automatic paging of your data and you set that by specifiying the pageSize attribute. This value is automatically passed onto your cfc as well.

Lets take a quick look at the code for the Artist cfc:

Nothing new here, or is there? Well if you spotted the queryconvertforgrid function as new you are right, its nothing I built, its a new function desiged specifically for converting a query into something that the cfgrid can use, it also takes the page, and pagesize attributes as arguments so it only passes back the specific page needed.

Another thing, if you have firebug installed you will be able to see how the call is made to your cfc. For my example I left out the argument collection: http://localhost/mycf/components/artgallery/artist.cfc?method=getArtists&returnFormat=json&argumentCollection=

for binding to CFC's coldfusion automatically appends the argument pair "returnFormat=json" this ensures that what you get back is a valid json dataset.

There is a lot more you can do with the cfgrid and a bit of javascript coding, you could use the and tags which allow you to interact with your grid by attaching events handlers to specific events in the grid and then performing actions.

You could quite easily set up master/deatail pages using ajax calls to get the data and update a detail form on the same page. And then update the data asynchronously and then at the same time automatically refresh the grid, pretty darn cool!

In future posts I will explore setting up a master detail form and creating editable grids, and exploring some of the other new features of Coldfusion 8