Fully Qualified Field

Question

I have a question about JDBC drivers. I am trying to access a field from a query row using the fully qualified field name. That is, I'm tring to use the <table-name>.<field-name> naming convention. For example:
  SELECT EMPLOYEE.NAME FROM EMPLOYEE ;
The fully qualified name would be EMPLOYEE.NAME. Most SQL servers understand this. I've found that there are JDBC drivers out there that cannot retrieve the field using this fully qualified name:
  rs.getString("EMPLOYEE.NAME") ;
The above statement may throw an exception on one driver and return null for another. I've modified a driver to allow this naming convention, but I'm worried that it's not part of the actual JDBC specification. Is this true?
On the other hand, field alias seems to work:
  SELECT EMPLOYEE.NAME EMPLOYEE_NAME FROM EMPLOYEE ;
  rs.getString("EMPLOYEE_NAME") ;
Most drivers allow this. Although I have seen a few that don't. I can live with having to give a field alias. Should I leave it at that?
Anthony

Answer 1

The issue is the the column name in the returned resultset is not the fully qualified column name. The resultset only returns the column name without the tablename prefix. Even if you have a statment like the following:
select Request.RequestID, RequestStatus.RequestID from Request, RequestStatus
The resultset returned will have two columns named RequestID.
An alternative is to retrieve the resultset using the column number from the resultset( ie. var = rset.getString(1)).