Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages™

18.5. An Interactive Query Viewer

Up to this point, all the database results have been based upon queries that were known at the time the program was written. In many real applications, however, queries are derived from user input that is not known until runtime.

Sometimes the queries follow a fixed format even though certain values change. You should make use of prepared statements in such a case; see Section 18.6 for details. Other times, however, even the query format is variable. Fortunately, this situation presents no problem, since ResultSetMetaData can be used to determine the number, names, and types of columns in a ResultSet, as was discussed in Section 18.1 (Basic Steps in Using JDBC). In fact, the database utilities of Listing 18.6 ...