How to retrieve dynamic content from database?

Question

I'm evaluating java-based cms and selecting one as our cms ,now I'm learning dotcms , I need to know how to retrieve content from db like traditional jsp/bo does,I'm new to dotcms, the official documents only tell how to add static content but dynamic content , say running a sql and getting the wanted data ,then putting them into pages. We are doing an internal website where employees can browse news, events, colleagues information etc which managed through a cms, the information is definitely dynamic and updated regularly. We plan to use spring mvc on the project. Any ideas on the question?

thank you.

Answer 1

To get this to work you need to do a few things:

1. If you want to use a different database, then you can add a new resource to the conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml file. If you want to use the dotCMS database to host the additional tables then you can skip this step.

2. From within your java code you can get a database connection using the DbConnectionFactory class. Now you can read the data from the database. Here's an example: import java.sql.Connection; import java.sql.ResultSet; import java.sql.SQLException; import java.sql.Statement;

   Connection conn = DbConnectionFactory.getConnection();
   Statement selectStatement;
   try {
     selectStatement = conn.createStatement();
     try {
       selectStatement.execute("SELECT * FROM your_table WHERE your_where_clause etc...");
       ResultSet result = selectStatement.getResultSet();
       if (result.next()) {
         .. do your stuff here...
         // for example:
         // Long dbId = result.getLong("Id");
         // String stringField = result.getString("stringFieldName");
         // int intField = result.getInt("intFieldName");
       } finally  {
         selectStatement.close();
       }
     } catch (SQLException e1) {
        // Log the error here
     }
   

   }

3. If you want to use this data in velocity you'll need to create a viewtool. Read more about that here: http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/DynamicPluginsViewtool