Thank you David. It appears that you have already accomplished what I need to. At this point, I am leaning toward your strategy #2. There is not much data to be passed from the 3rd party MSSQL into Drupal. However, that few fields of data are critical to the clients associate program. Once I break away from the 3rd party prescribed and provided methods, I will loose any and all support of the 3rd party backoffice software provider. Drupal is too good a solution for the client needs to let this be a show stopper. I have not yet received approval from the 3rd party provider for a direct connect to their db outside of the provided ASP, I am hopeful that will happen. This is part of why I am leaning toward strategy #2. I am thinking: strip down the current ASP pages to just grab the needed data, transparent to the end user, and feed it back into Drupal for use and display. I just haven't figured out how to make this happen within Drupal. A sample module will be very much appreciated and hopefully help others as well. Ron D. David Metzler wrote:
I have done a ton of MSSQL integration with drupal. Here's the strategies I use.
1. When directly connecting to MSSQL databases, I actually use the ADODB library. It's really similar to the ADODB stuff you find in ASP so it makes porting a breeze. If you're using PHP 5 you can foreach iterate the returned record sets. I chose this library because it's a good platform agnostic way of getting at DB's but doesn't confuse the issue with drupal. I use the drupal API's for all things non-database. It doesn't conflict at all with drupal's stuff.
2. I also have written several .NET consuming apps in a REST web services style to consume data from the ASP or .net apps. The ASP (or .NET) pages simply display (based on get or post parameters) either hand rolled XML or key value pairs like on a URL parameter var1=foo&var2=bar etc. Which you choose depends on the complexity of the data. Again PHP 5 is a big bonus here for the parsing of XML (simplexml rocks for this).
I have some students at my school developing an integration module for a 3rd party app with a that might be simple enough too illustrate the direct DB connect option. I'd be willing to send on a sample module if that would help you out.
FYI: ADODB is a php only library, so installing it is a breeze. It layers on the normal php db functions. I've also successfully run ADODB connecting to mssql on windows platforms.
On Aug 15, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Ron Dorman wrote:
A client wants to move an existing site to Drupal.
The catch is that the existing site has two pages that are ASP. The ASP pages connect to a 3rd party hosted backoffice package and database.
The clients current site is on a dedicated leased Win / IIS / Plesk Control Panel server. The Plesk package provides php 5.2 and MySQL 5 so I do not believe we will have any issues installing and running Drupal on the server.
Does anyone know of any development, module, etc. that would allow us to integrate the ASP data into Drupal?
Any other gotchas I should be looking for?
Thank you all for the work you do and for the Drupal software.
Ron D.
-- Ron Dorman Simply Digital Technologies www.simplydigtech.net rwd@simplydigtech.net 817-503-7704 ofc 817-503-7719 fax 817-528-8947 cell