How do I know if a table column value is auto-increment?

The ResultSetMetaData.isAutoIncrement() method can tell us if a column value is automatically numbered or not. This method return true when the column is an auto-increment column, otherwise it returns false. See the example below where we check if the first column (id) is an auto-increment column.

package org.kodejava.jdbc;

import java.sql.*;

public class IsAutoIncrementExample {
    private static final String URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/kodejava";
    private static final String USERNAME = "kodejava";
    private static final String PASSWORD = "s3cr*t";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (Connection connection =
                     DriverManager.getConnection(URL, USERNAME, PASSWORD)) {

            Statement statement = connection.createStatement();
            ResultSet resultSet = statement.executeQuery(
                    "SELECT id, username, order_date FROM purchase_order");

            // The ResultSetMetaData is where all metadata related
            // information for a result set is stored.
            ResultSetMetaData metadata = resultSet.getMetaData();
            if (metadata.isAutoIncrement(1)) {
                System.out.println("Column `id` is an auto-increment column.");
            }
        } catch (SQLException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-j</artifactId>
    <version>8.4.0</version>
</dependency>