How to retrieve dynamic content from database? - content-management-system

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:
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.
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
}
}
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