Connect Bridge Support in MatchPoint

Date: 03. Aug 2016

Connect Bridge allows developers to securely connect into various business software through their APIs without the need to learn their documentation, instead it's possible to use simple SQL statements. With the realeases of MatchPoint 4.0.12 and 5.0.0 we added better support for Connect Bridge and added some features which help to make better use of the Connect Bridge's great functionality.

Setting up Connect Bridge in MatchPoint

If you want to use Connect Bridge in MatchPoint the only thing you have to do is to define a ConnectionString in the CredentialStoreConfiguration:

`ConnectBridge::Driver={{Media Gateway ODBC Driver}};IMPL=CORBA;HOST='<SERVER NAME>';PORT='8087';ACC='<DATABASE / CATALOG NAME>';UID='<USERNAME>';PWD='<PASSWORD>'`

Note that the ConnectBridge:: is mandatory! MatchPoint uses this to optimize certain (SQL) operations. Apart from this prefix it's an ordinary ODBC connection string.

Using Connect Bridge

Since Connect Bridge uses SQL it can be used in various places within MatchPoint:

Entity Model

You can define your own entity model for tables from Connect Bridge. This works exactly the same way as defining a "normal SQL entity model". Note that some Connect Bridge tables do not support all CRUD operations and often only simple relations (to other entities) are supported. For more details consult the Connect Bridge documentation.

DatabaseActions

DatabaseActions are obviously predestined to work with Connect Bridge. You can define your own SQL, do what you want and use it in many different places, for example:

• As form button/ribbon actions
• In the ModelActionDataProvider
• In the ExpressionDataAdapter
• In Workflows (e.g. as entry actions)
• As Pre-/Postactions in forms or when creating workspaces

DatabaseProvider

If you only need your Connect Bridge logic in one place you can also use a DbDataProvider for a composite or datagrid web part and define your custom SQL "inline".

Conclusion

That's it! If you use Connect Bridge together with MatchPoint you can easily access and even modify data from a big variety of data sources (e.g. Google Drive, Exchange, Dropbox, Trello, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and many more).