[news.eclipse.birt] Problems providing BIRT a JDBC connection using ODA

[mniki25@xxxxxxxxx (Mike )]

I have a JEE application that has a JDBC connection pool.  I want to 
provide a connection from this pool to BIRT, which is integrated into this 
app using the BIRT Report Engine API.

This post on BIRT World outlines exactly what I need, however I've not 
been able to get it working.

http://birtworld.blogspot.com/2007/01/birt-connection-pooling-continued.html

Here is what I've done and I'll try to provide as much detail as possible 
in case someone out there can see where I've gone wrong.  When my app 
starts it loads BIRT and sets the parent classloader:

engine.getConfig().getAppContext().put( 
EngineConstants.APPCONTEXT_CLASSLOADER_KEY, getClass().getClassLoader() );

I then created a plug-in with the following plugin.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?eclipse version="3.2"?>
<plugin>
  <extension
        id="x.y.z.reporting.birtjdbc"
        
point="org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.oda.consumer.driverBridge">
		<bridge
			driverType="net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver"
			bridgeId="x.y.z.reporting.birtjdbc">
		</bridge>
  </extension>
 <extension 
        point="org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.oda.dataSource"> 
     <dataSource 
           odaVersion="3.0" 
           driverClass="x.y.z.reporting.BirtJdbcDriver" 
           defaultDisplayName="My JDBC Driver Bridge" 
           setThreadContextClassLoader="false" 
           id="x.y.z.reporting.birtjdbc"/> 
  </extension> 
</plugin>

I did not use the Eclipse PDE to create the plugin, rather I created it by 
hand using the example in the blog post.  I then created a directory 
called x.y.z.reporting.birtjdbc under my ReportEngine/plugins directory 
and copied the plugin.xml file to it.

Next I created the class x.y.z.reporting.BirtJdbcDriver, which extends 
OdaJdbcDriver.  This class is identical to the example except that it 
looks for the Connection using the key "x.y.z.reporting.BirtJdbcDriver".  
This class is packaged up with my JEE app, but should be accessible to 
BIRT because I've set its parent classloader.

Before I run any report task, I add my JDBC connection to the appContext 
from the task:

appContext.put( "x.y.z.reporting.BirtJdbcDriver", myJdbcConnection );

My reports are designed with a datasource set to use the jTDS driver 
net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver.  In the BIRT designer I can run reports 
that access a database with the defined JDBC URL and I can see results 
from the database.

However when I try to run these reports in my app server I was seeing 
ClassNotFoundError's on the jTDS driver.  I thought setting the parent 
classloader in BIRT would take care of this since that lib is in my apps 
classpath.  Next I dropped my jtds.jar file in the drivers directory of my 
oda.jdbc plugin and fired up my app again.  This time BIRT loaded my JDBC 
driver but it used the connection information defined in my report to talk 
to the database, not my driverBridge plugin.

I've turned up the logging in BIRT to FINEST but it does not emit anything 
to the log about failing to load my plugin, and I've debugged my app and 
it doesn't attempt to create a new instance of my BirtJdbcDriver class.

So at this point I have two problems, which could be related.  First is 
that BIRT can't load my JDBC driver if I do not put the library in the 
drivers directory of the oda.jdbc plugin.  Second is BIRT does not use my 
configured driverBridge plugin.  Does anyone have any thoughts on how I 
can resolve either of these issues.  Thanks