Configure the CData JDBC Driver for SharePoint in a Connection Pool in Tomcat

The CData JDBC Drivers support standard JDBC interfaces to integrate with Web applications running on the JVM. This article details how to connect to SharePoint data from a connection pool in Tomcat.

Getting Started

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Connect to SharePoint Data through a Connection Pool in Tomcat

1. Copy the CData JAR and CData .lic file to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. The CData JAR is located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
2. Add a definition of the resource to the context. Specify the JDBC URL here.

   Set the URL property to the base SharePoint site or to a sub-site. This allows you to query any lists and other SharePoint entities defined for the site or sub-site.

   The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid SharePoint user credentials when using SharePoint On-Premise.

   If you are connecting to SharePoint Online, set the SharePointEdition to SHAREPOINTONLINE along with the User and Password connection string properties. For more details on connecting to SharePoint Online, see the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the SharePoint JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.sharepoint.jar
   

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)
   

   You can see the JDBC URL specified in the resource definition below.

   <Resource name="jdbc/sharepoint" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" driverClassName="cdata.jdbc.sharepoint.SharePointDriver" factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory" url="jdbc:sharepoint:User=myuseraccount;Password=mypassword;Auth Scheme=NTLM;URL=http://sharepointserver/mysite;SharePointEdition=SharePointOnPremise;" maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="-1" />
   

   To allow a single application to access SharePoint data, add the code above to the context.xml in the application's META-INF directory.

   For a shared resource configuration, add the code above to the context.xml located in $CATALINA_BASE/conf. A shared resource configuration provides connectivity to SharePoint for all applications.

3. Add a reference to the resource to the web.xml for the application.

    SharePoint data JSP
    jdbc/SharePoint
    javax.sql.DataSource
    Container
   
   

4. Initialize connections from the connection pool:

   Context initContext = new InitialContext();
   Context envContext = (Context)initContext.lookup("java:/comp/env");
   DataSource ds = (DataSource)envContext.lookup("jdbc/SharePoint");
   Connection conn = ds.getConnection();
    

More Tomcat Integration

The steps above show how to connect to SharePoint data in a simple connection pooling scenario. For more use cases and information, see the JNDI Datasource How-To in the Tomcat documentation.