Databases are an important part of most web applications. In this web presentation a database is set up for the Cars JSF web application. It illustrates the use of the following tools:

• the NetBeans development environment,
• the GlassFish Java Server Faces (JSF) web application server, and
• the Apache Derby database server.

Source code and web pages for the Cars JSF web application are available here.

Two steps are require to set up and populate the database tables for the application:

• Set up a database in NetBeans
• Build tables and add content to them

To make the Cars application run it must have access to the database.

• Set up the database as a web application resource

The rest of this presentation provides some additional information:

• Use of the web application resource
• The Cars JSF application files

Complete versions of the NetBeans IDE are bundled with an Apache Derby database server. It provides support for creating a Derby database and building tables in the database.

There are five tables in the Cars database:

• the person table
• the manufacturer table
• the model table
• the car table
• the ownership table

The SQL files for building, populating, and viewing these tables can are included in the Cars project in the "Web Pages/sql/" folder.

Detailed steps for executing SQL are given for the person table.

There are 3 SQL files for the Manufacturer table:

• manufacturer-create.sql
• manufacturer-insert.sql
• manufacturer-select.sql

These files should be executed in order. The last one is a select statement. You should view the select results by clicking on the "manufacturer-select.sql" tab in NetBeans.

There are 4 SQL files for the Model table:

• model-create.sql
• model-insert.sql
• model-select.sql
• model-view.sql

These files should be executed in order. The last two are both select statements. You should view the select results and notice the difference.

There are 4 SQL files for the Car table:

• car-create.sql
• car-insert.sql
• car-select.sql
• car-view.sql

These files should be executed in order. The last two are both select statements. You should view the select results and notice the difference.

There are 3 SQL files for the Ownership table:

• ownership-create.sql
• ownership-insert.sql
• ownership-select.sql
• ownership-view.sql

These files should be executed in order. The last two are both select statements. You should view the select results and notice the difference.

Once a connection pool resource is set up for a JSF application the application can have access to the database while it is running. In order to use the access, database access code needs to inject the resource with an @Resource annotation added to a variable of type DataSource. The "name" parameter for the annotation must match the JNDI name for the resource.

The annotation automatically initializes the variable when the bean that contains it is created. You should not make any assignment to the variable. Typically the only thing you do with it is send it getConnection() messages.

The code below is part of the code for the cars.Database class. It captures the ideas presented above.