Database application development is a feature of JBuilder Professional and Enterprise. Distributed application development is a feature of JBuilder Enterprise.
Once you've completed the providing phase of your application and have the data in an appropriate DataExpress package DataSet
component, you're ready to work on the core functionality of your application and its user interface. The previous chapter, "Filtering, sorting, and locating data", introduced sorting, filtering, and locating data in a data set. This chapter demonstrates other typical database applications.
A design feature of the DataExpress package is that the manipulation of data is independent of how the data was obtained. Regardless of which type of DataSet
component you use to obtain the data, you manipulate it and connect it to controls in exactly the same way. Most of the examples in this chapter use the QueryDataSet
component, but you can replace this with the TableDataSet
or any StorageDataSet
subclass without having to change code in the main body of your application.
Each sample is created using the JBuilder AppBrowser and design tools. Wherever possible, we'll use these tools to generate Java source code. Where necessary, we'll show you what code to modify, where, and how, to have your application perform a particular task.
These tutorials assume that you are comfortable using the JBuilder environment and do not provide detailed steps on how to use the user interface. If you're not yet comfortable with JBuilder, refer to the introductory tutorial in this manual or to the online help topic "Designing a user interface."
All of the following examples and tutorials involve accessing SQL data stored in a local JDataStore
. Finished projects and Java source files are provided in the JBuilder samples directory (/samples/DataExpress) for many of these tutorials, with comments in the source file where appropriate. We encourage you to use the samples as guides when adding these functions to your application.
To create a database application, you first need to connect to a database and provide data to a DataSet
. "Retrieving data for the tutorials" sets up a query that can be used for each of the following database tutorials.
"Creating lookups", includes information on creating a lookup using a picklist.