Why PDF?  Do you want to print it?

It sounds as though a proper DB would be overkill,
for such a simple list of titles and details.

This simple DB covers a lot of diverse areas
which are largely unrelated.
- GUI Development. <http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/>
- I/O <http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/>
- depending on a number of different paths you can take for
the file format, one of which is storing the records as CSV -
data parsing (not sure of a good tutorial on that), or serialisation,
except that you want the option to add fields later..
- Translating to PDF format (there are some tools for that,
but you'd have to Google them).

Until you further pin down whether a DB is required,
there are really too many paths to take, to go into
'links' at this stage - perhaps if you flesh out the idea
based on the above, and a bit of googling - we can
provide further pointers.

Andrew T.

This sounds like a homework assignment. Assuming it isn't you might
want to take a look here:
    http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

At least try not to reinvent all of the wheel,

Regards,

Richard

This is pretty clearly a database project, so I would recommend you use
a database. A little prep at the beginning and you will have a much
more flexible system. Design your DB in MySQL, with columns for the
DVD#, Genre, Title, and maybe Star and SecondStar, or whatever. Then,
look into JasperReports. Free (except for the documentation), and it
can create PDFs as well as regular reports. Create a few reports in
Jasper and your actual Java front end should be quite simple to create
and maintain.

If you had every movie in IMDB, that would be less than
70,000. Even with that number you could easily keep the
data in a flat file, and while running keep all data in memory
sorted and/or hashed by title, number, and genre. I do a
similar thing with a few hundred thousand download records,
and the performance is quite good.

Use a database. You already have two tables because you will want
another one to prevent an incorrect Genre being used. In addition it
provides tested, optimised code to do all the above.

It does not need to be a client-server database. An embedded database
requires two jar files to be added to your application. See
<http://database.profectus.com.au/#java> for an incomplete list.

As an aside, it is never necessary to use MySQL for anything and I
don't understand why anybody does. My reasons are given on the page
referenced above.

A database is even simpler. You can use Open Office Base
<http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html> to examine and change
your data, add new columns, produce PDF reports and do everything else
you have specified. I am assuming you are using this as an exercise to
learn Java. If you just want the application, Open Office Base
includes a wizard that sets up a DVD collection database.

Depending on the reason for you doing this I would consider the
following.
If your reasons are purly as an excersice to get better at java, I
would probably consider using a db, as that would involve using jdbc
and working with resultsets.
Of course the same goes for using plain textfiles as that would force
you to dig a bit into parsing textfiles, and also the design of the
textfiles.
Either way you are in for a fun and interesting project. If I were you
I would go for the jdbc as that will probably prove to be good
knowledge for you in the future.

If your reason for writing this is for a school project, I would talk
to your teacher, because I am sure that s/he would be more than happy
to give you a few pointers on what would be a good practise.

If your reason for writing this is to have a movie database with your
own collection of movies, I would look around the net.
I recently wrote a opensource program that can do exactly what you are
after, it is still in development but since it is open source you can
get the source and hack away at it if you like.

regards
Daniel
www.daik.se (with a link to my mediaorganizer I mentioned in the post)