What is the Mirth suggested way of adding JDBC drivers that are not part of the defaults?

[LeviLong01]

I am working on connecting to a Snowflake database and have successfully done so in Mirth by adding the Snowflake JDBC driver to the server-lib/database directory for the Mirth setup.

Is this the intended way Mirth had in mind for people to extend the supported databases on their own? If I add it to custom-lib directory it'll throw an error when running saying it can't find the driver.

[jonbartels]

MC 3.8.0 added the DB driver code to the config database. It used to be in dbdrivers.xml. What version of MC are you using? The feature is shown on page 316 at https://www.nextgen.com/-/media/files/nextgen-connect/nextgen-connect-311-user-guide.pdf shows how to add this to the list of DBs for the DB connectors, though it doesn't say where to put the drivers.

server-lib seems appropriate because that would make the driver available across all of MC on its classpath. That is in contrast with custom-lib and Resource Directories which are only loaded for channels that depend on those resources. Also note that custom-lib is deprecated and should almost never be used since Resource Directories is a replacement feature with better control.

[tonygermano]

Maybe related to this issue #4587?

[someguyyouneverheardof]

MC 3.8.0 added the DB driver code to the config database. It used to be in dbdrivers.xml.

From my very limited experience, the GUI editing tool is directly manipulating the dbdrivers.xml file.

[tonygermano]

From my very limited experience, the GUI editing tool is directly manipulating the dbdrivers.xml file.

In upgrades, the dbdrivers.xml file is used to seed the configuration in the database, and then it is no longer used.

[someguyyouneverheardof]

Ah, OK. Interesting that the file exists as part of a clean install of 3.11 but I guess it doesn't really hurt.

[tonygermano]

@someguyyouneverheardof https://forums.mirthproject.io/forum/mirth-connect/support/18442-dbdrivers-xml-and-3-8-0

[tonygermano]

It's always been a complaint of mine that it's never really been spelled out how to do this correctly. It's been less of an issue since the microsoft driver is included in recent versions of mirth as that was the one people were most often trying to use.

How are you trying to use the driver? With one of the database connectors or in javascript? If in javascript, what does your code look like?

[LeviLong01]

I've been working with their support to get an answer on if this is the preferred way and I am still not getting a straight answer from them. But based on @jonbartels answer that is the correct location to place it.

JavaScript that would perform the queries, but it is calling to a custom Java package loaded into Mirth for some pre-requisite steps. The Java package has the dependency in a shaded jar (thanks for that tip a while back) so it'll work without it in the server-lib/database directory, but when establishing a DatabaseConnection object is where it fails if that .jar is not in that directory.