[development] ASP Integration with Drupal?

[Ron Dorman]

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 at simplydigtech.net
817-503-7704 ofc
817-503-7719 fax
817-528-8947 cell