One of the most common tasks in ColdFusion programming is to output a simple table of information from a database. What if you have 100 rows to a page and the whole table is a white blur? It makes things hard to read doesn't it? And really, who wants to look at a plain white table when you could jazz it up with some color.
Which would you prefer?
AltaVista
www.altavista.com Google
www.google.com AltaVista
www.Webcrawler.com Excite
www.excite.com MSN
www.msn.com OR
AltaVista
www.altavista.com Google
www.google.com AltaVista
www.Webcrawler.com Excite
www.excite.com MSN
www.msn.com To get this effect, you will need to know 2 basic ColdFusion functions. The MOD operator and the IIF statement.
The MOD operator is a common operator among many languages. It simply takes the remainder of a number after it is divided by a divisor. For example, 18 MOD 5 would equal 3.
The IIF function is very similar to another ColdFusion tag, the CFIF tag. But with an IIF function, we can only have two statements. To use an IIF function we check a condition and if its true we do the first expression and if its false we do the second. See below:
IIf (condition, expression1, expression2)
To change the background color of a row we will place an IIF and a MOD statement in the TR tag. You will also notice the double pound(#) signs. These are required in a CFOUTPUT tag to cancel the other out. If we don't do this, ColdFusion will try to read whatever is between the pound signs and error out in this case.
Our code for alternating rows will look this:
#Engine_Name# |
#Engine_URL# |
#Engine_Rank#< |
You can download the code for this tutorial by clicking on the links above.
