Newbie with JSP & JDBC questions

Question

Hi. I have a quick question. I have a client jsp page with a table, listing all the fields from my mySQL table called kellybclients. At the end of each row, I also have a submit button that I would like navigate the user to the campus jsp page that only shows the data associated with the client who's button they clicked on in the table. I'm trying to figure out how to pass this data from my JSP into the rowset.setCommand method in my connection/data bean. I am using a cached row set. Here's the code from my bean:
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package ETS;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import javax.sql.rowset.CachedRowSet;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import com.sun.rowset.CachedRowSetImpl;
public class CampusDataBean {
    private CachedRowSet rowSet;
  public CampusDataBean() throws Exception
    Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
    rowSet = new CachedRowSetImpl();
    rowSet.setUrl("jdbc:mysql://traderseven.nmsu.edu/is470Spring08?relaxAutoCommit=true");
    rowSet.setUsername("is470Spring08");
    rowSet.setPassword("1DoNtier");
    rowSet.setCommand("SELECT campid, clientid, campname,campcounty FROM kellybCampus WHERE clientid=?");
    CampusBean camp = new CampusBean();
    rowSet.setString(1, camp.getClientID());
    rowSet.execute();
  public ArrayList<CampusBean> getCampusList() throws SQLException
    ArrayList<CampusBean> campusList = new ArrayList<CampusBean>();
    rowSet.beforeFirst();
    while(rowSet.next())
      CampusBean campus = new CampusBean();
      campus.setCampID(rowSet.getString(1));
      campus.setClientID(rowSet.getString (2));
      campus.setCampName(rowSet.getString(3));
      campus.setCounty(rowSet.getString(4));
      campusList.add(campus);
    return campusList;
public void addCampus(CampusBean campus) throws SQLException
    rowSet.moveToInsertRow();
    rowSet.updateString(1,campus.getCampID());
    rowSet.updateString(2,campus.getClientID());
    rowSet.updateString(3,campus.getCampName());
    rowSet.updateString(4,campus.getCounty());
    rowSet.insertRow();
    rowSet.moveToCurrentRow();
    rowSet.acceptChanges();
}I'm sorry if this is too vague. I'd appreciate any help, fixes, or pointers on where to learn how to do this. Thank you again.
KellyJo

Answer 1

So the button should be a Submit button for a form. There are a couple of different methods for doing this:
1) Each row on the table can be a different form, each form uses the same action (servlet) target and has a hidden input with a unique identifier for each of the clients:
<table>
  <tr><form action="selectClient" method="post"><td> etc </td><td><input type="hidden" name="id" value="1"/><input type="submit"/></td></form></tr>
  <tr><form action="selectClient" method="post"><td> etc </td><td><input type="hidden" name="id" value="2"/><input type="submit"/></td></form></tr>2) Use a single form with a button type=submit for each row with different values (Note: This is broken in IE7 so you probably shouldn't use it)
<table><form action="selectClient" method="post">
  <tr><td> etc </td><td><button type="submit" name="id" value="1">Submit</button></td></tr>
  <tr><td> etc </td><td><button type="submit" name="id" value="2">Submit</button></td></tr>3) Use a single form, have a hidden value with a blank value. Each row has a submit button with a javascript onclick method that sets the form's hidden value to one appropriate to the row, then submits the form. I won't show you this code but there are examples on the web.
4) Use a single form with an input="submit" element on each row. Each button would have a different name with the ID info encoded in it, then you would have server-side code that takes parameters, finds the right one and parses out the proper row to edit:
<table><form action="selectClient" method="post">
  <tr><td> etc </td><td><input type="submit" name="submit__id_1"/></td></tr>
  <tr><td> etc </td><td><input type="submit" name="submit__id_2"/></td></tr>I think most people end up doing some variant of 3, which I don't like because I hate to rely on JavaScript to make my web apps work properly. I would prefer 4, which takes more work on the server side (which I like better) but 1 works just as well with a lot more typing and uglier HTML code. Actually, I would like 2 the best because that is pretty much what the <button> element was designed for, but Microsoft screwed that up.