Configure the CData JDBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central in a Connection Pool in Tomcat

The CData JDBC Drivers support standard JDBC interfaces to integrate with Web applications running on the JVM. This article details how to connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central data from a connection pool in Tomcat.

Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central Data through a Connection Pool in Tomcat

1. Copy the CData JAR and CData .lic file to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. The CData JAR is located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
2. Add a definition of the resource to the context. Specify the JDBC URL here.

   To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must provide the User and AccessKey properties.

   To obtain the User and AccessKey values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the User and AccessKey connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.

   To connect to data, specify OrganizationUrl. If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the Company to indicate which company you would like to connect to. Company does not need to be specified if you have only one company.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Dynamics 365 Business Central JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.d365businesscentral.jar

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   You can see the JDBC URL specified in the resource definition below.

   <Resource name="jdbc/d365businesscentral" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" driverClassName="cdata.jdbc.d365businesscentral.D365BusinessCentralDriver" factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory" url="jdbc:d365businesscentral:OrganizationUrl=https://myaccount.financials.dynamics.com/;" maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="-1" />

   To allow a single application to access Dynamics 365 Business Central data, add the code above to the context.xml in the application's META-INF directory.

   For a shared resource configuration, add the code above to the context.xml located in $CATALINA_BASE/conf. A shared resource configuration provides connectivity to Dynamics 365 Business Central for all applications.

3. Add a reference to the resource to the web.xml for the application. Dynamics 365 Business Central data JSP jdbc/D365BusinessCentral javax.sql.DataSource Container
4. Initialize connections from the connection pool: Context initContext = new InitialContext(); Context envContext = (Context)initContext.lookup("java:/comp/env"); DataSource ds = (DataSource)envContext.lookup("jdbc/D365BusinessCentral"); Connection conn = ds.getConnection();

More Tomcat Integration

The steps above show how to connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central data in a simple connection pooling scenario. For more use cases and information, see the JNDI Datasource How-To in the Tomcat documentation.