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Introduction

This tutorial expands on the Introducing EGL tutorial by teaching you more advanced uses of EGL and JSF. In this tutorial, you create two pages that allow a user to search a database in different ways.
These pages accept input from the user, search the database for records that match the input, and display the results on the same page. This is not the only way or the best way to create a search page, but this way illustrates several important EGL and JSF concepts.

The search pages you create in this module are very different from web search engines or pages that search the Internet or a single web site. The search pages you create in this module search for database records, not for web pages or information on web pages.

Learning objectives

In this tutorial, you learn how to do these tasks:

Time required

This tutorial should take approximately 90 minutes to finish. If you explore other concepts related to this tutorial, it could take longer to complete.

Prerequisites

Before you start this tutorial, you must complete the ../../com.ibm.etools.egl.tutorial0001.doc/topics/egl_abstract01.html tutorial. The current tutorial uses the database connection and the pages you set up in that earlier tutorial.

Tutorial application

When you are finished with the tutorial, you will have a search page that can take input from users, compare it against the data in a database, and return results to the user. You will learn how to create a search that uses two parameters simultaneously (an AND search); you will also learn to change that search to one that uses one or the other of the two parameters (an OR search) and you will place a radio button group on the page to allow the user to choose between types. You will also learn how to limit the user's choice of search parameters by placing a combo box on the page; this presents a list of selections to the user instead of allowing them to type in a string. Finally, you will learn how to customize the search results, combining fields and determining how the output appears on the page.

The first completed search page will look like this:

Finished page

The second search page you will create demonstrates some simple uses of AJAX functionality with EGL. One common used of AJAX is to provide suggestions for user input as type-ahead support. In this way, the page searches the database for items similar to what the user has already typed in an input field:

A picture of the type-ahead control providing suggestions

Once the user has accepted one of the suggestions, the page will use another AJAX request to display the database information without reloading the page:

Finished page using the AJAX request

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