Steps to use ResultSetMetaData in JDBC

Below are the steps to use the RSMD (ResultSetMetaData) in JDBC to retrieve information about ResultSet Columns.

Step 1: ResultSetMetaData can be used by importing the ResultSetMetaData interface from java.sql package in the JDBC program.

import java.sql.ResultSetMetaData;

Step 2: After importing the package create a connection with your database through your jdbc connector and Driver. In this article, I’ll be using MySQL as my jdbc database

Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/dbname", "yourusername", 
                                                                                          "your password");
Statement stmt = con.createStatement()) ;

Step 3: Create a SQL query through the Statement object which returns an object of ResultSet type. e.g.: select query to view all information.

String query = "SELECT * FROM testtable";
            ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery(query);

Step 4: Now that we have the ResultSet object we can create the ResultSetMetaData object using the .getMetaData( ) method of the ResultSet interface as:

ResultSetMetaData rstm=rs.getMetaData();

The getMetaData( ) method of ResultSet returns an instance of ResultSetMetaData for the same resultset which triggered the method call. This ResultSetMetaData object can be further used with its various methods such as getColumnName( ) , getColumnCount( ) which we are going to discuss in later section of the article.

ResultSetMetaData is an interface in Java under the package java.sql.ResultSetMetaData which can be used in determining or retrieving the structural characteristics of a table’s ResultSet. It is not always necessary for the programmer to know the structural information of a ResultSet column (such as name, datatype, count, or other information associated with a specific column) being returned by the ResultSet object’s get( ) method.

In this article, we are going to learn about retrieving the Metadata of a table in the database through JDBC’s ResultSetMetaData interface.