JSP html form generation based on JDBC meta data - sql

Question

could anybody give me a good idea or hint (not a tool) how I could implement a JDBC meta data based automatic generation of html forms?
I have solved this before in a Java standalone program - now I want to expand the idea within html.
I do NOT want to use Spring, Wicket or JSF to solve the problem, I want to do it myown to learn from scratch.
I have searched really a lot, I found a lot of stuff, but nothing which could answer my question. But I am sure this problem has been solved in the past a dozen times.
Thank you
Alex

Answer 1

Create a servlet class, let it call your "Java standalone program" in the doGet() method, get the desired data in form of some List<Row> from it, put it in the request scope and forward the request to JSP
List<Row> rows = yourProgram.list();
request.setAttribute("rows", rows);
request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/list.jsp").forward(request, response);
And finally in /WEB-INF/list.jsp use the JSTL c:forEach to display it.
<%#taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%#taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>
...
<table>
<tr>
<c:forEach items="${rows[0].columns}" var="column">
<th><c:out value="${column.name}" /></th>
</c:forEach>
</tr>
<c:forEach items="${rows}" var="row">
<tr>
<c:forEach items="${row.columns}" var="column">
<td><input type="text" name="${fn:escapeXml(column.name)}" value="${fn:escapeXml(column.value)}" /></td>
</c:ForEach>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
</table>
Let it submit to a servlet by <form method="post"> and gather the data in doPost() method.