Project 7 Handling Charting and E-Mail Integration in ColdFusion MX

Project 7 Overview

In this project, you'll be working with data presentation using charts. You'll learn how to use the e-mail integration feature that ColdFusion MX provides.

SellingOnTheWeb is an e-commerce company that is interested in capturing market share. To materialize its goal, the company needs to perform some data analysis. Also, the company needs to perform some aggressive marketing by organizing e-campaigns. It requires an application that can show customer buying patterns. The application should also have a built-in ability to send and receive e-mails.

The new Sales Data Analyst tool that you'll build in this project will help the company create better sales data analysis charts. In addition, this application will enable users to send relevant e-mails to customers.

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

• View sales figures of different categories of products for the current year and month in a chart.

• View the items with the highest sales figures.

• Drill down from the main category-based chart to view the information related to all the items in that category.

• Send and view e-mails sent by customers.

The Sales Data Analyst tool uses the <CFCHART> and <CFCHARTSERIES> charting tags to create different types of charts. The <CFMAIL> tag is used to send e-mails to the customers. The <CFPOP> tag is used to read the e-mails received from the customers. The sales data that's used by the Sales Data Analyst tool is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. The key points that are covered in this project are as follows:

• Create different types of charts by using the <CFCHART> tag.

• Create drill-down charts to present data in a systematic and focused manner.

• Send and receive e-mails using the <CFMAIL> and <CFPOP> tags.