[Newbie] Model2 JSP + JDBC + JSTL forEach

Question

Hi,
This is my first post.
I'm running into a bit of brain failure over decoupling my JSP view page from the specifics of the JDBC the model uses.
I want to avoid the easy route of:
Controller
- interogates request as default main listing page.
- runs a JDBC query
- pops the ResultSet in the request
- forwards to the mainlisting.jsp view
JSP View
- Uses a scriplet to iterate and display the contents of the results set as an HTML table.
For a start I don't want to pass a ResultSet to the view page. I'd like to keep it completely ignorant of whether the application is using JDBC, XML or an EJB for it's data tier.
My first smart? idea was to write an adapter for ResultSet that provides a standard List (or similar) interface, taking data from the ResultSet and returning 'domain' value objects instead of Rows.
This presents a secondary problem however. In order to provide a List of beans around the result set I either need to copy the whole result set into an ArrayList or Vector on creation, or implement the entire List interface myself (<yawn>).
So I figured if it's that hard, it can't be the correct way.
Ultimately I'm after some type of Bean collection I can populate (or wrap around) a ResultSet, so that the following JSP will display the list.
<ul>
<c:forEach items="${theListOfItems}" var="item">
<li><c:out value="${item.foo}" /> - <c:out value="${item.bar}" /></li>
</c:forEach>
</ul>
Any pointers?
Cheers
Paul

Answer 1

I'm quite pleased I was on the right track and I even accepted defeat in finding a pipelining way to iterating over the beans attached to the underlying result set and .. as you suggest .. loading it all into beans on creation.
I ended up with this:
package uk.co.cmm.tvrecorder.webapp;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Date;
@SuppressWarnings("serial")
public class RecordingList extends ArrayList<Recording> {
     public RecordingList(ResultSet res) throws SQLException {
          while( res.next() ) {
               Recording rec = new Recording();
               rec.setId(res.getInt("id"));
               rec.setChannel(res.getString("chan"));
               rec.setProgName(res.getString("prog"));
               rec.setPrio(res.getInt("prio"));
               // Date-Times are stored as Unix long ints
               // Why?  Legacy database - allows numerical comparison in legacy dvb recorder shell component.
               // Possible future change to SQL DateTime but not just now.
               Date d = new Date(res.getLong("start")*1000);
               rec.setStart(d);
               d = new Date(res.getLong("stop")*1000);
               rec.setStop(d);
               this.add(rec);
}Which then allowed me to have:
<table>
<tr><th>Programme</th><th>Channel</th><th>Date</th><th>Start</th><th>Stop</th><th>Prio</th></tr>
<c:forEach items="${recordings}" var="item">
     <c:choose>
                 <!-- when is running now -->
          <c:when test="${(now ge item.start) and (now lt item.stop)}">
               <c:set var="style" value="background-color:red;" />
          </c:when>
          <c:otherwise>
               <c:set var="style" value="background-color:white;" />
          </c:otherwise>
     </c:choose>
     <tr style="<c:out value="${style}" />">
          <td><c:out value="${item.progName}" /></td>
          <td><c:out value="${item.channel}" /></td>
          <td><fmt:formatDate type="date" dateStyle="FULL" value="${item.start}"  /></td>          
          <td><fmt:formatDate type="time" value="${item.start}" /></td>          
          <td><fmt:formatDate type="time" timeStyle="LONG" value="${item.stop }" /></td>          
          <td><c:out value="${item.prio}" /></td>     
     </tr>
</c:forEach>That's that sorted, I think.... NEXT!
Is this the correct way to put a var into an HTML attribute?
     <tr style="<c:out value="${style}" />">Cheers
Paul