Sorry about that last post: I hit send(CTRL-ENTER) by accident when I was pasting (CTRL-V). Here is my post: I can think of two different approaches. Approach 1 Use hidden fields for each field that you do not display in your initial table. This is essentially an enumeration of your complete result set (SELECT *). This is alright for small datasets but will become increasingly slow as your table(s) grow. Also, keep in mind the type of HTTP request you are doing: an HTTP GET can only be 2KB in size, so if your record selection(s) are numerous, you may wind up missing information on subsequent requests. I would stay away from this approach personally. I was forced to work on a system that took this approach and it was impossible to manage and maintain (a few of the fields that were being passed back and forth were SQL TEXT fields (fields that could be +2gig in size...imagine *trying* to pass that as a FORM parameter!). Approach 2 On your first request (the request that displays the table), write your query to get only enough information for the user to make a logical selection on the records that they may want further detail on. Also, get the PK(Primary Key) of the table. Use the PK of the table you are querying as the value of the checkbox. In your subsequent requests, pass the PK back to your servlet and get the rest of the info from the database at that time using the supplied PKs. This way, you only select the details of the records you *really* need. You could even take it one step further by caching resultsets in memory or something instead of performing an SQL SELECT every time. The nice thing about this approach is the small amount of information you need to pass back and forth for your requests. I think you may find that performing additional queries against the DB will be faster than parsing through a String constently. I guess a simple demo of the above would be (Person Table): First screen display person name in a table, have a check box beside it with the person's ID (this is the PK). When I submit the form, the PK is the only piece of data that is required to be passed back. I read in all the PKs and perform my SQL select on only the PKs that I was supplied (for arguement sake lets say I perform a SELECT *). I then display the details of these records in an HTML page, if I have links to other pages, I supply the PK of the person to each of those links. And so on.... Hopefully this will help you out without being to verbose. Chris [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff SERVLET-INTEREST". Archives: http://archives.java.sun.com/archives/servlet-interest.html Resources: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/external-resources.html LISTSERV Help: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/user/user.html
