Adding to an ArrayList

Question

I have been staring at this for 2 days now, and finally decided to ask the experts.
I have a method of a class that should fetch records from a (textual) database en return an ArrayList with all the records. Each record in turn should contain all the (4) fields.
Well, it pretty much all works fine, except for the fact that the line 'dbRecs.add(rec)' overwrites ALL ArrayList elements with the new record, instead of just the last. That is, I presume this is the case, since this is what a spying-loop showing the content af all the entries of the ArrayList (not included in the code, but added right after the wretched line) tells me.
The code shows the method, and the class of the records with the fields.
Any enlightenment on what the ... is wrong would be greatly appreciated.
public ArrayList getDbRecords() {
          ArrayList dbRecs;
          String dbLine;
          String[] splitstring;
          dbRecs = new ArrayList(15);
          DbRecord rec;
          BufferedReader in;
          try {
               FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream(SystemVars.dbFileName); // Open the file
               in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fstream));
               rec = new DbRecord();
               int i = 0;
               while ((dbLine = in.readLine()) != null) { // Continue to read lines until eof
                    i++;
                    splitstring = dbLine.split("\"");
                    rec.proverb     = splitstring[1];
                    rec.nl = splitstring[3];
                    rec.transl = splitstring[5];
                    rec.extra = splitstring[7];
                    dbRecs.add(rec); //add record to ArrayList
               } //end 'while'
               in.close();
     catch (Exception e) {
               System.err.println("File input error");
          dbRecs.trimToSize();
          return(dbRecs);
class DbRecord {
     String proverb,nl,transl,extra;
}

Answer 1

               rec = new DbRecord();
               int i = 0;
while ((dbLine = in.readLine()) != null) { //
// Continue to read lines until eof
                    i++;
                    splitstring = dbLine.split("\"");
                    rec.proverb     = splitstring[1];
                    rec.nl = splitstring[3];
                    rec.transl = splitstring[5];
                    rec.extra = splitstring[7];
dbRecs.add(rec); //add
/add record to ArrayList
} //end
end 'while'This is a real conceptual error. You are initialising the object outside the while loop and adding it to the list inside the loop. Everytime you reference the same object and the arraylist does nothing more than storing the references to them.
The solution is to initialise the object each time in the loop, so that every object in the arraylist would refer to a different object.
Another thing that I noticed is that the code is rather sloppy. You seem to have bypassed the concept of encapsulation totally... which defeats the very purpose of OOP. Make the member variables private and use getter/setter methods to access them.
Phew!
***Annie***