You can connect to any number of databases or files that you like
- provided that you understand the implications of doing so.
Ultimately DNN is still at whole big bag of ASP.NET based code talking to a database.
Natively inside DNN there is its own implementation of a data access layer - which DNN uses for all its data access and which module developers are encouraged to use. This is the DAL and more recently DAL+ element of DNN.
BUT - in reality there is nothing stopping you writing your own connection calls and executequery calls to any other database - and handling the returned data etc .
If you are already doing this in your external application then you already understand the coding required.
ABout the only REAL advantage of using the dnn DAL over your own homebrew- is that the DNN DAL provides a set of functional data abstration layers to remove lots of database access coding and reduce ugly pages of code questing and updating data to nice clean object based code like:
myINFO = myCTL.getkey( someDatakey)
myINFO.somefield = "some newvalue"
myCTL.update( myINFO)
Thats "three" lines of code to update the contents of a field in a sql table.
How many lines of code would that be taking you now ?
>>>>>>>>>
I guess the other question really is - why have a seperate WEB SITE and APPLICATION - seems like you could cut down on repetition by developing the whole show on a DNN based web portal.
Westa