JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Reading and Storing Information in a Database

The first page the user loads to register an employee in the example application is enter.jsp. This page, which contains a form for entering all information about an employee, is shown in Figure 12-4.

Figure 12-4. Employee information entry form

The input is validated by the validate.jsp page when the form is submitted. The enter.jsp and validate.jsp pages are similar to the pages for input validation discussed in detail in Chapter 10 and don’t access the database. Instead of going through these pages now, let’s jump directly to the store.jsp page where the database access takes place. We’ll return to the enter.jsp and validate.jsp pages at the end of this chapter, to look at some interesting things not related to database access.

Example 12-1 shows the complete store.jsp page. This page first searches the database for information about an employee with the specified username. If one is found, the database is updated with all the other employee information the user entered. Otherwise, a new employee entry is stored in the database. All database information about the employee is then collected, and the request is forwarded to the confirmation.jsp page. Let’s look at the complete page first and then discuss the different pieces in detail.

Example 12-1. Database access page (store.jsp)

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" ...