How do I connect to a Websphere Datasource with a given JNDI name?

Question

I\'m using Websphere Portal 7.0 and creating a portlet with RAD 8.0. My portlet is trying to make a db2 connection to a remote server. I wrote a java program locally to do a

Answer 1

To get a connection from a data source, the following code should work:

import java.sql.Connection;

import javax.naming.Context;
import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.sql.DataSource;

Context ctx = new InitialContext();
DataSource dataSource = ctx.lookup("java:comp/env/jdbc/xxxx");
Connection conn = dataSource.getConnection();

// use the connection

conn.close();

While you can look up a data source as defined in the Websphere Data Sources config (i.e. through the websphere console) directly, the lookup from java:comp/env/jdbc/xxxx means that there needs to be an entry in web.xml:

    jdbc/xxxx
    javax.sql.DataSource
    Container
    Shareable

This means that data sources can be mapped on a per application bases and you don't need to change the name of the data source if you want to point your app to a different data source. This is useful when deploying the application to different servers (e.g. test, preprod, prod) which need to point to different databases.