ExternalDB Has Moved!

We've moved maintenance of ExternalDB over to mkali.net, we recommend updating your bookmarks.

Introduction

ExternalDB was created for internal use at HORIZONSolutions.tv to overcome a simple yet common problem - how to connect to an external database, or multiple external databases, for multiple components / plugins / modules without having to duplicate the connection details again and again.

We created a plugin, ExternalDB, which allowed us to set these connection details once and get on with it!  Because of the kind of work we do we often have to query multiple databases to retrieve things like tournament information, player rankings and other such things that can't be moved into the local dataset as you would want to in these situations.

It's such a useful tool to us know that we install it with nearly every Joomla! deployment that we do.

Installing and Configuring

• Install the plugin in the usual way, then make sure you enable it!
• In Plugin Manager, configure your external database details for the database(s) you need.
  
  • DSN: Your name for the database to be used later on
  • Hostname: Host where the MySQL server is
  • Port Number: Defaults to 3306, but can change if needed
  • Username / Password : Authentication details for the database
  • Database Name: Name of the MySQL database to use

Implementing

This is where most of the confusion is, by what I read in my email from people asking me how to use it!  This is a code solution to using external databases.  There is no way of using this without modifying some code.  That out of the way, here's how to use it in that code.

ExternalDB simply creates a new jDatabase object with your given connection details - nothing clever but simple to maintain connection details. Here's a sample of code from one of our components...

// Create new ExternalDB instance, using the details that we set earlier.  
// 'resultsDb' is what we called the DSN
$dbxo = new externaldatabase ( 'resultsDb' );  

// Create a new jDatabase object, connected with the details from the above selected DSN.  
// We call ExternalDB objects $dbx just as a standard practice
$dbx = $dbxo->getDB ();

$sql = "SELECT * FROM sport WHERE site = 2"; // Some simple SQL..

// Now you use your ExternalDB object in exactly the same way as you would the regular DB object..
$dbx->setQuery ( $sql );
$dbx->query ();
$res = $dbx->loadAssocList ();

I hope this clears up things!  We'll be working on moving this over to 1.6 very soon.