Do Not Do the Work Your Database Can Do

Yesterday I had to quickly generate some reports for my general manager.  Two of them were no-brainers, just a straight read from a table and dumping out the data in a PDF.  The third was a little more complicated, or so I thought.

Basically my database has three main tables:  one for basic client information, one for a summary of policy information, and one table holds the actual policy data.  In case you could not guess, my primary occupation is in insurance.  They needed a report based off of a field from the policy data and that is not exactly a structured table.  Each row contains an associated PolicyID, a FieldName, and a Data value.  The great part about doing it this way is if I need to add a field to the policy information I just add it to the form with no need to edit the database structure or the CFC that handles reading and writing the data.  Painless.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was trying to come up with a solution in CF that involved querying the policy data table to get all the unique values for the field I needed.  Then I was going to loop through that data and build a client and policy query from scratch.  I was so focused on a CF-based solution I missed the obvious one, just modifying the client query I used on the other reports to include the field I needed.  It only took 5 minutes to get it going instead of hours and a couple hundred lines of code.

I have seen quite a few other blog posts recently stating much the same thing.  Next time I suppose I should pay better attention to them.