Hi,

I am taking my first steps in DotNetNuke. My question must be very basic.

I easily set up a portal. Now I am trying to create a module that does some custom actions, such as querying a table in the DB.

 During the installation process, I created a DotNetNuke database which contains tables such as Portals, PortalSettings, Skins,  Profile, Users, etc. Also, when I afterwards created a module, a table named [my company name]_[module name] was created, along with a few stored procedures with names like [my company name]_Add / Delete / Get / Update [module name].

The problem is the data I want to query is not in that DotNetNuke (let's call it "DB_DNN") database but in another SQL Server DB (it will be "DB_other" for us), in the same server, that holds the tables for the company's employees data.

Do I need to replicate or link all of the data in DB_other to DB_DNN to be able to access it from NukeDotNetNuke? Can't I connect somehow to the source DB?

Thanks in advance,

Dani

Thanks, Cathal,

That is exactly what i am after, I would like to use an additional connection string.

Maybe I am not understanding how it all works. As I understand it, my module makes use of five stored procedures to work with data in the database. I have a DataProvider abstract class that defines several methods to deal with DB data. These are overriden in its derivated class called SqlDataProvider. In the constructor of SqlDataProvider, we can find the following lines of code:

            //Get Connection string from web.config
            _connectionString = Config.GetConnectionString();

            if (_connectionString == "")
            {
                // Use connection string specified in provider
                _connectionString = objProvider.Attributes["connectionString"];
            }

When it does
    _connectionString = Config.GetConnectionString();
Is it looking for a connection string in web.config? In that case, if we have several connections strings defined, how can we specify which of them to use?

If it doesn't find one,

    if (_connectionString == "")

Where are provider connection strings defined?
    _connectionString = objProvider.Attributes["connectionString"];

Is it here where I should specify a different connection string depending o which data I am using? Can I set a connection string pointing to my employees DB and still be able to work with my DotNetNuke DB?

Thanks ins advance,

Dani

Dani, it depends on how you want to access your data - you may either use stored procedures or Linq2Sql, but you should avoid creating SQL queries from text dynamically passing to the database, due to the high risk of SQL injection.

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Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

   

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