C O N N E C T I N G   T O   D A T A B A S E S   A N D   O T H E R   R E S O U R C E   M A N A G E R S  

connection.  IdleTimeoutMinutes indicates approximately how long a connection can be 

unused before being discarded.  This is especially useful if your driver closes unused 

connections without telling you.  Generally an idle connection should be removed within 1.5 

* IdleTimeoutMinutes. 

Finally, and very importantly, the criteria attribute indicates how the ConnectionManager 

decides if two connections are interchangeable.  You can usually get connections by either 

getConnection() or by getConnection(userinfo).  The former relies on the container to 

manage security, the latter on the application.  If you are using container managed security, 

set the criteria to ByContainer: if you are using only application managed security, use 

ByApplication.  Do not use both with one ConnectionManager. If you are using default 

user/password values specified in the ManagedConnectionFactoryProperties, or if your 

adapter supports reauthentication, use ByNothing.  Note that if you are using Application 

managed security you must leave the SecurityDomainJndiName attribute empty to avoid 

exceptions and general failure.  If you can set other properties in your getConnection(stuff) 

call, such as transaction isolation perhaps, you may need ByContainerAndApplication.  Note 

that the MinSize and MaxSize apply to each distinguishable set of connections.  If you are 

using ByContainer, and have 5 user identities, and a MaxSize of 10, you can get up to 50 

connections, 10 per identity.  Currently there is no support for a "global" MaxSize attribute. 

If you are using a jdbc driver, you have two choices of jca jdbc wrapper. If your driver 

supports only the Driver interface, use the jboss local jdbc.rar.  If your driver provides an 

XADataSource implementation, use the jboss xa.rar.  Note that with the jboss xa.rar, one of 

the ManagedConnectionFactoryProperties is a semicolon separated list of name=value pairs 

for the XADataSource properties of your driver. As of this writing, the xa wrapper has some 

problems if you hold connections over calls to other ejbs or if you attempt to hold connections 

between method calls. 

Examples for popular databases are provided in the  docs/examples/jca directory. 

Deployment of your adapter configuration 

If you are deploying a wrapped database driver, put the driver jar in lib or use a classpath 

element to force its loading before the mbean deployment.  With the current system, the 

depends elements will force the resource adapter module (rar) to be deployed before your 

ConnectionManager configuration. So: make sure the driver.jar, if required, is in lib, deploy 

the rar by copying it to deploy, and deploy the ConnectionManager mbeans by copying the * 

service.xml file to deploy.  Don t forget that you need to set up security information in login 

conf.xml.

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