database driven form controls

How to do databse driveen jsp page,

Suppose i have 5 text fields,if user wants to put one of the form field as select box.JSp should identify and return the select box if it define in db as select box.

I dont know how to achieve this,can a开发者_JS百科nyone suggest this.

Regards, Raju komaturi

There are multiple tasks if you want to do this completely. The world at large has not gone this way and so there are not many tools (if any) for this. But basically here are the main ideas.

1) You want a "data dictionary", a collection of meta-data that tells you what the types and sizes of each column are, and the primary and foreign keys are.

2) For your example of "knowing" that a field should be a drop-down, this almost always means that column value is a foreign key to another table. Your code detects this and builds a listbox out of the values in the parent table.

3) You can go so far as to create a complete form generator for simple tables, where all of the HTML is generated, but you always need a way to override this for the more complex forms. If you do this, your data dictionary should also have column descriptions or captions.

There are many many more ideas, but this is the starting point for what you describe.