Project 6 Handling XML in ColdFusion MX

Project 6 Overview

In the current business climate, electronic data exchange between business partners is common. XML is a good medium for performing these electronic data exchanges.

In this project, you'll implement XML along with ColdFusion MX Server to provide a new solution to the Purchasing department of a fictitious car manufacturing company called WeMakeCars, Inc. This company needs to communicate with business partners on a regular basis to exchange documents such as purchase orders and invoices. The Purchase Management application will help them reduce the time involved in sending the documents back and forth.

The users of this application will be able to perform the following tasks:

• Generate purchase orders directly from the requisition data sent by the Production department.

• Convert purchase orders in XML format.

• View XML-formatted invoices.

• Save invoice information in the database tables.

The Purchase Management application is a Web-based application that's supported on a ColdFusion MX server. This application uses a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database for storing all the required data. ColdFusion MX provides the <CFXML> tag to work with XML data. This is a versatile tag for creating XML documents. Using functions such as XmlParse and an XML document object along with the object hierarchy makes it possible to read the XML documents. The key points that are covered in this project are as follows:

• Create XML documents programmatically.

• Work with an XML document object.

• Read XML data from XML files.