[opencms-dev] Displaying External Data in OpenCms 9

[Michael Emmerich]

Hello,

there are several ways how you can work with external contents, for 
selecting the best way to do it, it often depends how often the external 
content is updated.

Some examples what we did in projects so far:

Example 1:
Some product data should be displayed, (we are talking about 200-300 
products). This data is provided by an xml import which is imported into 
OpenCms and for each product one xmlcontent is created.
Advantages: You can then use the default OpenCms methods to create the 
output pages. You can use the OpenCms permissions system do 
automatically add permissions to the products during the imports (which 
was required).  You only need access to the external data source during 
the import.
Disadvantages: Such a solution is not so good if you have to update the 
data very often (several times a day) or if you have a lot of products.

Example 2:
Direct access to an external data source. Some product data should be 
directly displayed from an external database. So we made a direct access 
to this data in our functional elements, by accessing the database via 
JDBC in a java bean.
Advantages: Works good with a lot of data entries, easy to implement
Disadvantage: You need permanent access to the external database, you 
cannot use the "normal" access methods to your content in your jsps

Example 3:
For a customer, we needed direct access to an external database (show 
lists of those data), but the external database should be edited form 
within OpenCms. The structure of this data was in a quite similar way as 
it is in an xmlcontent with nested elements.
So we implemented a special content in OpenCms which automatically 
creates dummy xmlcontent files which are automatically filled with data 
fomr the database. You then could edit this content with the normal 
editor in OpenCms (as this is a xmlcontent at that time). When saving, 
the data form the xmlcontent is stored in the database. Access to the 
data for display was like in Example 2.
Advantages: Works good with a lot of data entries, easy to use editing 
of this data for content managers.
Disadvantage:  Was quite complicated to implement.

So you see, there is no real "best" way how to do this, it always 
depends on your use case. Mostly, I would think that either Example 1 or 
2 would be those use cases that are most common.

Kind regards,
Michael



Am 18.11.2013 22:06, schrieb dayv2005:
> I was wondering what people were doing to display external data from another
> database in OpenCms 9?
>
> We have a web vehicle internal application that is managed by our software.
> We want to integrate it into OpenCms. I wrote the schemas, formatters, list
> and detail page. But this only works if you create the instance in OpenCms.
>
> How are people connecting to external databases?
>
> I realize I could use dynamic function and use the jsp sql library and read
> the data like that. This is probably the best way to handle this but you
> lose so much functionality of OpenCms handling it this way.
>
> I read some older papers on using TOS but that seemed to be more of a one
> time import and continue managing the objects from the website.
>
> Is there anyway to import in real time from an external database into the
> given resource type?
>
> Manly wanted to start this discussion to see what others have done and
> what's doable and the best case usage.
>
> Thanks
>
>
>
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