SWT: A Developer's Notebook

Populating Text Fields from a Database

If you are developing corporate IT applications, you will invariably find a need to populate a series of text fields based upon a database query. To do that, you must understand how to work with the contents of a JDBC ResultSet.

How do I do that?

The code to accomplish this task is straightforward. The following code will connect to the MS Access Northwind sample database, using the JDBC/ODBC Bridge driver:

Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:NorthWind");
Statement stmt = conn.createStatement( );
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM Employees");
if(rs.next( )) {
   text1.setText(rs.getString("FirstName"));
   text2.setText(rs.getString("LastName"));
  }

The text fields text1 and text2 are populated with the String values in the FirstName and LastName columns of the result set’s first row.

What about...

those times when the column data in the ResultSet is not a String? For those occasions, use one of the other result set methods, such as getInt() to retrieve the data and then convert it to a String value to pass to the setText( ) method, like so:

text2.setText(Integer.toString(rs.getInteger("EmployeID")
));