Reducing Transaction Frequency

My niece was using the Applet last night, and in a couple of hours she generated a thousand lines of data, each one requiring it's own transaction with the database. A quick forum post confirmed that I need to modify the code so as to send more data with each transaction.

My first instinct was to upload data at the end of every activity, and I coded for that.

So the addItem3 method, which previously posted data after every item, was reduced down to accumulate a multiline SQL insert command in a new string , and the guts of it were put into a new addItem4 method, which posted the now multiline command:

private void addItem3(String newWord) {
if(firstPass) {
firstPass = false;
sqlbuffer = sqlbuffer + newWord;
}
else {
sqlbuffer = sqlbuffer + ", ";
sqlbuffer = sqlbuffer + newWord;
}
}

private void addItem4(String newWord) {
if(LIVE) {
sqlbuffer = sqlbuffer + ", ";
sqlbuffer = sqlbuffer + newWord;
firstPass = true;
if(jso != null )
try {
jso.call("updateWebPage", new String[] {sqlbuffer});
sqlbuffer = "";
}
catch (Exception ex) {
addItem2("jso call failed... ");
ex.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

But problems arose with posting 15 and 20 line inserts. So I modified the code again such that on longer activities, addItem4 gets called after 10 items, as well as on completion of the activity:

if ((oldItem == 10) && (NoOfItems > 10)) {
addItem4(qTrack.datInsert());
} else {
addItem3(qTrack.datInsert());
}

Then there was a typhoon, which prevented anything happening for a few days.