Core J2EE™ Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies

Value List Handler

Context

The client requires a list of items from the service for presentation. The number of items in the list is unknown and can be quite large in many instances.

Problem

Most J2EE applications have a search and query requirement to search and list certain data. In some cases, such a search and query operation could yield results that can be quite large. It is impractical to return the full result set when the client's requirements are to traverse the results, rather than process the complete set. Typically, a client uses the results of a query for read-only purposes, such as displaying the result list. Often, the client views only the first few matching records, and then may discard the remaining records and attempt a new ...