"raas" wrote...

It's not that complicated, once you've grasped the idea of Object-oriented
programming, or at least the fundamentals of OO Analysis and Design. That
will help you immensly.

I began a million years ago as a COBOL programmer myself, so believe me when
I say it's not impossible...

I actually believe it's easier for somone proficient in COBOL, than one with
only VB... ;-)

What I think you struggle with, is the concepts of classes and objects.

As a COBOL-programmer, you're familiar with calling subroutines and other
procedures. With OO, it's quite similar, but I think you can get a bit
further if you think of it as you're creating another computer (the object)
which you call the procedures on.

In order to make an object to do something, it needs to exist, i.e. to be
instantiated from a class.

To give a short example:
========================
import java.io.*;
import java.sql.*;

class ConnectionHolder
{
   private Connection con = null;

   public ConnectionHolder(String path) throws SQLException
   {
       DriverManager.registerDriver(new sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver());

       String url =
           "jdbc:odbc:DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ="
           + path;

       File file = new File(path);

       if (!file.exists())
       {
           throw new SQLException("\nFile \"" + path + "\" not found");
       }
       con = DriverManager.getConnection(url);
   }

   public Connection getConnection()
   {
       return con;
   }

   public void closeConnection()
   {
       try
       {
           con.close();
       }
       catch (SQLException x)
       {
          // Already closed, somehow...
       }
   }
}
========================

Now, if you want to *use* a class, you need to instantiate an object from
it, and call some method on the object, e.g.:

  try
  {
     ConnectionHolder ch =
        new ConnectionHolder("C:\\db\\mytables.mdb");
  }
  catch (SQLException se)
  {
     // Display some error message,
     // and break out of the routine...
  }

  Connection conn = ch.getConnection();

  // Do whatever with your connection...

  ch.closeConnection();

There are thousands of variants on this, depending on how you need to use
it, e.g. if you want to use a single connection from many places, you could
probably make your ConnectionHolder instance "static", in order to get the
connection where you need it, and close it when you close the application.

Possibly.

I suggest you look up some good book on OO Analysis and Design, so you don't
get stuck in the procedural habits of COBOL and VB. There's a lot more to
say about OO than can fit into a small post on Usenet...

// Bjorn A

I'll add my 2 cents...

using the jdbc:odbc:DRIVER with MS Access has always been an iffy task. Sun clearly
states that the jdbc:odbc:DRIVER is not production quality.

I've used it ad-hoc apps with success. My purpose in stating this is that you may
run into problems that are caused by the driver that should not reflect badly on
Java as a whole. Just a FYI...