gui data entry screen

[scottnweber]

Is there any GUI screen for creating data entry forms? Something similar to CF Report Builder would be great. Where you can add feilds from tables directly to the screen in a design mode and then save the screen as a CF file for use on a web-site.

Please forgive if this is a stupid question, I am new to CF. Thanks!

[Adam Cameron.]

You probably want to look @ DreamWeaver, or something like that.

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Adam

[scottnweber]

Thanks Adam I will check that out. Are you familiar with CFB2? I am using that instead of Dreamweaver. Do you know if that has any GUI drop and drag features for fields and stuff?

[Adam Cameron. · Accepted solution]

Yep, definitely familar with CFB, but it's not a "design" tool: it's a coding tool; so doesn't do the visual side of things.  That's why I recommended DW for what your requirements are.

Depending on how your shop works, there's (at least) two different niches to to fulfil: people like me who just write code, and whilst I do some mark-up, it's not my job to style it, so I don't need a visual display, I just need to type code in.  So I use CFB (or CFE if you want to save yourself some £££).  We have other dudes who do the CSS and the rest of the dollying-up of the mark-up, and they use DreamWeaver, as it handles both the visual side of things, as well as understanding the CF code that's in there too.

We also have designers that do the actual... err... well... the design, and they use Adobe Illustrator or something like that.  I dunno... I never work with them; the UI developers take whatever they produce and cut that up.  I think it's .ai files that our UI guys receive from the designers though.

Anyway, if you're doing both code and mark-up/CSS-based visuals, you want DW rather than CFB I think.  There's also some Eclipse plug-in called "Aptana" that I've heard people bang on about... I think it's something to do with the mark-up side of things (well, OK, I know it is something to do with that side of things, but I've never used it, so don't know much about it other than that it exists).  Dunno if it's "visual" or not though... I've never had to find out.  Maybe look into it though.

Sorry if I sound dismissive of the touchy-feely side of things: I'm one of these web dinosaurs that - if it was up to me - everything would be in verdana 11pt, and we'd use tables for layout.  With border=1 to "make it look a bit smart".  One of my colleagues as said something about something called "client side scripting" that people do these days: "Java    Script" or something like that.  I can't see that taking off: who uses Java anyhow?  😉

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Adam

[scottnweber]

Thanks Adam I really appreciate your insight to this topic and the time you took to write your reply. I am new to CF and I have a long MS Access background so I am used to creating forms for data entry. When I saw the Report Builder it looked very similar to MS Access reports so naturally I thought it would be great to have something simlar to design CF data screens.

I am a bit of a dinosaur myself going back to the dbase III days and ms dos batch files so I can appreciate were you are comming from. BTW our shop is brand new. We have one CF app that was done by an outside programmer and now we want to understand how to develop it going forward.

I will definately check out Dreamweaver and the other stuff you mentioned. I know many CF developers use dreamweaver and I didn't understand why but now I do thanks to you!!