Webmaster Forum / ColdFusion / Getting Started / October 2004

i have been using coldfusion for a while and whenever i use form validation i
generally use CFFORM and CFInput tags and set required=true and message=message
to display in alert.

this works but what i would like to do is instead of an alert window with the
error message, reload the form, populated with the entered data and have a Red
star or something next to the feild that caused the error and diaplay an error
message at the top of the page, like "you need to enter a valid birthdate" or
something.

now i know that i could do this by having my form handler page have the logic
to validate the feilds and then include or do a cflocation to the original form
- but the trick is populating the form.  in the past i have had code that
creates new hidden form elements from the submitted form values and then uses
those values to populate the feilds but thats a pain to do, isnt there a
simpler way to use this style of validation?