Question

I am seeking advice in persisting my JTable data in an elegant manner. So far my research has indicated I can iterate through the many columns and rows and extract the data for saving (seems convoluted) or that I can save the table and related data as an Object in an Object file.

I would love to hear some advice from those more versed in this area as I am quite new to JTables and their workings. Are there many other solutions available that may be a better choice?

Answer 1

It depends on what you want to do with the persisted data. If you only want to persist it so that you can display it again later, look at serializing (Java Serializable or Java Externalizable) it to a data-stream that you put somewhere. Later you can read it back (deserialize) and display it again.

If you want to put it in a database where the information is useable for other purposes, then you probably want to implement some object which models your data to keep it clear and simple. Then you can present this in a Swing Jtable by adapting your model to a table model. This still means you need to write the adaptation/transformation logic but it shouldn’t be onerous and you get the most usable result. The TableModel is simply a way of looking at your data that a JTable is able to understand. Look at Adaptor patterns to get one idea about the mapping.

Hope that helps.