Configure the CData JDBC Driver for LDAP 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 LDAP objects from a connection pool in Tomcat.

Connect to LDAP Objects 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 establish a connection, the following properties under the Authentication section must be provided:

   • Valid User and Password credentials (e.g., Domain\BobF or cn=Bob F,ou=Employees,dc=Domain).
   • Server information, including the IP or host name of the Server, as well as the Port.

   • BaseDN: This will limit the scope of LDAP searches to the height of the distinguished name provided.

     Note: Specifying a narrow BaseDN may greatly increase performance; for example, cn=users,dc=domain will only return results contained within cn=users and its children.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

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

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.ldap.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/ldap" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" driverClassName="cdata.jdbc.ldap.LDAPDriver" factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory" url="jdbc:ldap:User=Domain\BobF;Password=bob123456;Server=10.0.1.1;Port=389;" maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="-1" />

   To allow a single application to access LDAP objects, 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 LDAP for all applications.

3. Add a reference to the resource to the web.xml for the application. LDAP objects JSP jdbc/LDAP 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/LDAP"); Connection conn = ds.getConnection();

More Tomcat Integration

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