Tomcat JNDI connections

If you installed the Pentaho Server using the manual installation method, then you specified data connections to your Tomcat web application server. If you want to modify existing connections or add more connections, perform the following tasks.

Note: Database connection and network information, such as the username, password, driver class information, IP address or domain name, and port numbers for your Pentaho Repository database are stored in the context.xml file. Modify this file to reflect the database connection and network information to reflect your operating environment. You also modify the values for the validationQuery parameters in this file if you have chosen to use a Pentaho Repository database other than PostgreSQL.

1. Stop the Tomcat and Pentaho Servers.

2. Consult your database documentation to determine the class name and connection string for your database.

3. Edit the /tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml file.

4. At the end of the <web-app> element, in the same part of the file where you see <!-- insert additional resource-refs -->, add the following XML snippet:

   <resource-ref>
       <description>myDataSource</description>
       <res-ref-name>jdbc/myDataSource</res-ref-name>
       <res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>
       <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
   </resource-ref>

   Change the description and res-ref-name nodes, as well as any others that apply to your situation and fit your database. You may need to consult the JNDI Resources article in the Apache Tomcat documentation to see if there are other components to consider.

5. Save and close the web.xml file.

6. Edit the/tomcat/conf/context.xml with a text editor. Alternatively, you can modify the /tomcat/webapps/pentaho/META-INF/context.xml file if you want this data connection to be available only to the Pentaho Server. Adding JNDI connections to the context.xml makes them available to all of the webapps deployed to this Tomcat instance.

7. Anywhere inside of the Context element, add the following XML snippet:

   <Resource name="jdbc/myDataSource"
       auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
       factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory"
       maxActive="20"
       maxIdle="5"
       maxWait="10000"
       username="dbuser"
       password="password"
       driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
       url="jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1:5432/myDataSource"
   />

8. The example above shows a simple PostgreSQL configuration. Replace the Resource name, username, password, driverClassName, and url parameters, or any relevant connection settings, to match your database connection information and the details you supplied in the web.xml file earlier.

9. Save and close the context.xml file.

10. Delete the pentaho.xml filed located in the /tomcat/conf/catalina/ directory. The pentaho.xml is a cached copy of the context.xml file you modified. Since the cache is not usually configured to update frequently, you have to delete the pentaho.xml file and let Tomcat recreate it when it starts up.

11. Start the Tomcat and Pentaho servers.

Tomcat can now properly connect to your data.