<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><br>
2. The connection string (with passwords). Right now I have the site admins hack in connection strings for external databases into settings.php in the sites folder. That probably won't work for a true ad hoc reporting solution, since we may want users to be able to connect to databases from the UI? Is it untenable to store these using variable_set? Are there any ideas for securing them inside the drupal DB?<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I can confirm that you can connect to dbs by dynamically adding connection strings stored in the DB to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px; border-collapse: collapse; ">$GLOBAL['db_url'] </span>at any time, which does save having people editing settings.php</div>
<div><br></div><div>We do it to connect to other Drupal databases for queries.</div><div><br></div><div>For external DBs might be interesting to see if you could use Data (<a href="http://drupal.org/project/data">drupal.org/project/data</a>) to integrate with Views and let users build the queries via the Views UI. Never tried dynamically doing that but I think it is worth considering.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div><br></div><div>Ronald</div><div>---</div><div><a href="http://www.istos.it">http://www.istos.it</a></div></div>