DSN-less connections ColdFusion MX how to

[djeddiej]

Is there a tutorial or a straight forward methodology for DSNless connections with ColdFusion MX? It appears that the only way to create a database connection with CFMX is through setting up a DSN on the CF Server, which requires administrative access - and that may be a little too powerful to give to the general web developer.

Apparantly Macromedia has deprecated the older CFQuery attributes that supported creating DSN-less connections, probably because the Java backend does not support such connection mechanisms...so an alternate method would help. Also. how could one integrate these DSN-less methods with Dreamweaver MX, which looks for DSN connections?

 

[csteinhilber]

You're right, DSN-less connections are only supported by ColdFusion 5.0... not before, not after.

Because Macromedia rebuilt everything on the java platform for ColdFusion MX, they weren't able to carry that functionality forward (at least not immediately). Hopefully we'll see it reintroduced in a future rev of MX.

There is no alternate method for DSN-less connections purely in ColdFusion MX, unless, I suppose, you build a custom java driver that connects specifically to your database file and exposes enough functionality to work under the CF db driver API.

There might be some tricks you could do with setting up a PERL module to connect to your database, and calling it through CFEXECUTE, or setting up an ASP page that creates a DSN-less connection then call it with CFHTTP... but I doubt you'd be impressed with either the performance or the flexibility, to say nothing of scalability.

-Carl