September 2009 Archives

Today I went to see Old Blind Dogs in concert in Zumbrota, MN. All in all it was a very good show.

More about postfix tomorrow.

Usually I think of connecting to a data source as a relatively straightforward process involving something like Perl's DBI or .NET's System.Data.Odbc namespace and a connection string. When using a product like Jaspersoft, however, this task becomes slightly more difficult.

1. Download the appropriate driver from Oracle here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/java/sqlj_jdbc/index.html. There are a lot of really gory details about Java versions, so make sure to read the readme very carefully.
   
   For this example I'm using the 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.7.0) JDBC Drivers, download the file ojdbc6.jar.
2. You'll want to install the file into the /webapps/jasperserver/WEB-INF/lib directory and then chown/cmod it as appropriate. (You may need to reload the application or reload the server after this.)
3. Next, you're probably familar with this screen:
   

   

   Let's fill in the values for the form:

   Name: MyConnection
   Description: This is a description of my connection.
   Driver: oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver
   URL: jdbc:oracle:thin:@host.example.com:1521:mysid
   User Name: user123
   Password: notagoodpassword
   

4. At this point, you should be able to connect to the Oracle server from JasperSoft.

Unfortunately, I haven't entirely gone through all the log4j settings that JasperSoft has to argue, so I can't really say "go check the logs" in good faith. My diagnostic method was writing a quick java program to make sure that my connection strings were good and then just moving the driver around until the java vm detected it based on where the other JDBC provider drivers were.