Hi Karl,

Welcome to our.

There are several answers to your question. You can solve this issue in a way that feels most comfortable to you.

You can add a connection string and read your data using SQL queries or using ORM like NHibernate, Entity Framework or PetaPoco (which ships with Umbraco).

Or you can create a seperate webservice or WebApi application that you consume from Umbraco. 

In the views you can load the data.

Dave

Thanks Dave,

Could yo refer me to a sample with a secondary SQL connection string and retrieve data from Models to Umbraco Partial View?

Karl

Hi Karl,

In this code I created for a DUUG presentation is an example of getting data from a custom table (in this case is in the same database) using PetaPoco and exposed as through WebAPI.

You can use these models in your views.

Maybe it is a good starting point ?

Code can be found here : https://bitbucket.org/dawoe/duugcustomsections

Dave

Dave, I have need some time to make it work, but now I can use your sample and it looks great!

These are the steps I did, it will be useful for future readers of this post. It has been also a way to learn Umbraco installation

• Downlaod Umbraco 7.1.6 binary files and rewrite lost references in both projects http://our.umbraco.org/ReleaseDownload?id=131659
• Delete the hatefully Newtonsoft.Json all references and packages and reinstall updated version from Nuget
• Run Umbraco installation and enter to backoffice
• Edit my user to allow acces to Customer plugin
• Logout and Login and voila! I got it

Thanks for your support Karl

Glad to see it helped you further. Strange that you needed to download the 7.1.6 binary files by the way. I believe I enabled nuget package restore in the solution.

Dave

Hi Karl and David,

I'm facing the same challenge as Karl now, I want to be able to show data from an external database in an Umbraco partial view. I have followed this receipe for showing data from custom tables in the same database as Umbraco (in my case Umbraco.mdb) using PetaPoco, and this works fine. However, I now want to access data in a different database, assuming I can use the same Technology (PetaPoco).

So the question is: how do I connect the models and controllers to a different database than the Umbraco database? Where goes the secondary database connection string and where do I refer to it? From what I understand, this was what you were trying to do, Karl?

Best, Bendik

Thanks Dirk!

Yes, I figured this out, and I also figured out how to use it with PetaPoco: In your XyzRepository class:

Instead of

    private readonly UmbracoDatabase _database;

    public XyzRepository()
    {
        _database = ApplicationContext.Current.DatabaseContext.Database;
    }

you use

    private readonly Database _database;

    public XyzRepository()
    {
       _database = new Database("<The name of your connection string>");
    }

Simple as that! I also figured out the connection string to an MS Access database, in case anyone is interested:

connectionString="Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=|DataDirectory|\YourMSAccessDatabase.accdb" providerName="System.Data.OleDb"

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