Establishing a Connection

In this section we will use the Eclipse IDE as an example, but a similar approach can be used to integrate with other IDEs.

Configure the JDBC Connection

To browse a data source in Eclipse, you will need to install the 'Database Development' plugin for Eclipse. This plugin will allow you to configure a connection using any JDBC driver. Navigate to 'Window -> Open Perspective -> Database Development' to open the Database Explorer. Right click on Database Connections to configure a new connection and select the 'Generic JDBC' connection profile type. A similar approach will work in IntelliJ and NetBeans.

In the connection configuration window you can select the jar file by clicking on the wheel like icon to the right of the first row. This can be seen in the image below. This window also allows you to specify the connection URL. The connection URL is as below:

URL="jdbc:mscrm:user=myuseraccount;password=mypassword;URL=http://myserver/myOrgRoot;"

The URL must start with "jdbc:mscrm:...", and can include any of the connection properties separated with a semi-colon.

Explore the Meta-Data

Once a connection has been configured and verified, you can connect to MSCRM and see the tables and views available. See section Browsing data in IDEs for details.

The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid MSCRM user credentials. In addition, you will need to specify a Url to a valid MSCRM server organization root or OData services file. Also, you should specify a CacheLocation to store the metadata of your MSCRM Organization. This will keep the RSSBus JDBC Driver for MSCRM from having to send requests for metadata on each query.