ColdFusion 9 UI Enhancements: Creating Accordion Navigation Using CFLayout tag

Jul 21, 2009

2 minutes

The UI Enhancement in ColdFusion 9 includes many new AJAX control tags and enhancement to the existing UI controls in ColdFusion 8. The AJAX controls in ColdFusion leverages the ExtJS 3.0 Library for to create Rich UI Controls. The new addition is Accordion navigation to CFLayout tag. The accordion is very useful for compressing many elements in a compacts space in our web sites. Using the below code we can create accordion navigation in ColdFusion very easily.

<html>
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
	<title>Using Accordion in CFLayout</title>
</head>
<body>
    ### Using Accordion in CFLayout
    
    <cflayout name="myAccordionLayout" type="accordion" width="600px">
        
	<cflayoutarea title="ColdFusion 9 Tutorials" align="left">
		### ColdFusion 9 Tutorials
		<p>ColdFusion 9 Tutorials.</p>
	</cflayoutarea>

	<cflayoutarea title="CFScript Enhancement Tutorials">
		### ColdFusion Builder Tutorials
		<p>CFScript Enhancement Tutorials</p>
	</cflayoutarea>
					
	<cflayoutarea title="ColdFusion As a Serveice Tutorials" align="left">
		### ColdFusion 9 Tutorials
		<p>ColdFusion As a Serveice Tutorials</p>
	</cflayoutarea>
				
	<cflayoutarea title="Hibernate-based ORM Tutorials" align="left">
		### ColdFusion Builder Tutorials
		<p>Hibernate-based ORM Tutorials</p>
	</cflayoutarea>
    
    </cflayout>

</body>
</html>

CFLayout with Accordion Example

Each Accordion navigation generated using CFLayout tag will have a + or - button on the title area for to expand and collapse the accordion. By default the layout area will expand and collapse by clicking anywhere in the accordion title bar. This can be prevented using the attribute titleCollapse which makes the layout area will be expandable and collapsible only by clicking the + or - button in the title bar.

Comments

Phillip Senn on 2009-07-22
That's nice. I applied it here temporarily. http://adobecharlotte.coldfusion9.beta.hostek.com/CFMZenGarden/105 Can the accordion have some animation?

Jonathan on 2010-03-04
Seems like it has a bug where only the first item is populated. The title collapse doesn't work either.

prim on 2010-04-21
Is it possible to have this feature available in CF8? I mean if I use some kind of extensions or library? But where can I find them to achieve the same feature in ColdFusion 8. Thanks

Akbarsait on 2010-04-21
@Prim Yes you can implement Accordion navigation in CF 8 with some external JS libraries. - Adobe Spry http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/articles/accordion_overview/ - jQuery UI http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Accordion

mike on 2010-08-05
Can the + / - icons be replaced or deleted? Also, can i have different colors for each accordion? Thanks Mike

(Comments migrated from previous blog engine.)