Best Practive to resturn Resultset to a JSP page

Question

I'm writing a class to return a resultSet to use in a JSP page or at least i think thats what i want to do. Whats the best practice to return that resultset.....As the class is written below, when i try to iterate through the resultset in the jsp page i get a NullPointerException which i understand because i closed the connection before returning....If i take out all the code in the finally section i can iterate through the data no problem....but thats not good to leave connections open.......instead of returning a resultset should i return some other type such as an Array with all the data. How should i return the data?
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package foo;
import javax.naming.*;
import javax.sql.*;
import java.sql.*;
public class DBTest{
String foo = "Not Connected";
String bar = "Not";
public ResultSet getUser(){
Connection conn = null;
Statement stmt = null; //Or preparedStatement if needed
ResultSet rs = null;
try{
Context ctx = new InitialContext();
if(ctx == null)
throw new Exception("Boom - No Context");
DataSource ds = (DataSource)ctx.lookup("java:comp/env/jdbc/Show");
if(ds != null){
conn = ds.getConnection();
if(conn != null){
foo = "Got Connection " + conn.toString();
stmt = conn.createStatement();
rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM user");
if(rs.next()){
foo=rs.getString("login");
bar=rs.getString("password");
}catch(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}finally{
// Always make sure result sets and statements are closed,
// and the connection is returned to the pool.
if(rs != null){
try{
rs.close();
}catch(SQLException e){;}
rs=null;
if(stmt != null){
try{stmt.close();}catch(SQLException e){;}
stmt=null;
if(conn != null){
try{conn.close();}catch(SQLException e){;}
conn=null;
return rs;
public String getFoo(){return foo;}
public String getBar(){return bar;}

Answer 1

Yes, when you close your connection all data in your result set is lost, and yes its not a good idea to keep connections open. Its also not a good idea to pass results around. What you should do is store the data in some type of collection object and pass that to your jsp.
for exmaple if you select data from a table that stores names of people, e.g. two columns first_name and last_name, then create a class called People with two private string members to hold the first and last names. loop through your result set and build a People object for each row of data. when your done close the result set (and the connection if you want). store all your People objects is a collection (vector, array, whatever). pass the vector to your jsp for display.
-S-