Lesson 9. Completing the Price Calculator

Back in Lesson 7, you began the tour price calculator application and created most of its functionality. As you'll recall, though, you lacked the actual data required to make it work. That data is stored in the newland_tours.mdb database. In this lesson, you will finish what you started, by working with information from the database, controlling what data is retrieved and how it is displayed.

While there will be some hand-coding in this lesson, you will also make use of some of Dreamweaver's visual features for working with database data. For example, you will learn how to populate the drop-down list in the form on tourprice.asp with dynamic data using a simple dialog.

By the end of this lesson, the tour price calculator application will be fully functional with live data.

You'll also spend some more time working with SQL and creating queries. You'll see how to filter SQL queries using dynamic data, which enables you to deliver a truly customized experience to your users.

In addition, by the end of the lesson, both tourprice.asp and tourprice_processor.asp will have a number of server-side code blocksenough to make them hard to read. You'll learn how to document these blocks using comments, making the scriptsand the documents as a wholeeasier to read and maintain.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Dynamically populate a form menu with database data

• Filter a query using dynamic data

• Update the tour price calculation with live data

• Document your code with comments

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.

LESSON FILES

Starting Files:

Lesson09/Start/newland/tourprice.asp

Lesson09/Start/newland/tourprice_processor.asp

Completed Files:

Lesson09/Complete/newland/tourprice.asp

Lesson09/Complete/newland/tourprice_processor.asp