UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Leveraging an external database....

I have a pre-existing membership SQL database that is used by my site. Does UBB.threads have any APIs that allow me to use my existing database for authentication? I noticed that Infopop's OpenTopic solution seems to be able to do this...

No.

Hi - I was just checking through recent topics and this one caught my eye, because our association may face this problem if it becomes necessary to require registration and authenticate against a preexisting database.

How difficult would it be to write some kind of code to do this?

Thanks - Tony

It's not very difficult. I just got finished doing it to merge the registration/login processing for UBB.threads and osCommerce. It just takes time, like anything else.

Hi, Dave_L: So it seems to me that importing parts of our existing membership database to the mysql on my site wouldn't be a big deal.

But what would the main elements of checking a registrant name and one or two others pieces of info against that database be?

I haven't written any code in perl or php myself, but I imagine I could come up with a member who has...would that be the main thing? Or would it just be some kind of fancy database inquiry (which I also haven't done)...by the way, we have threads on a shared infopop server.

Would appreciate some notion of what it would take, in case it turns out we need to do this!

Thanks - Tony

PS in past years I HAVE written a fair amount of code (though not in the type of languages we're talking about here).

Just for clarification: Do you want to use one registration process and two seperate databases for both applications or do you want to have one registration process and one database for both applications?

Sorry for not being clear. Our professional asociation has an existing membership database that is maintained completely independently, as part of our association's main site. What we might want to do is to import part of the record for each member to the database on our forums site (into mysql, in particular). Then, when anybody registered for our forums, we would request certain information of them that we would then want to check against our imported database for authentication to complete the registration.

(Alternatively, we could try to make a check against the database on the main site, but this sounds like a programming and security nightmare!)

I hope that makes our potential need clear. (This would only be necessary if people who aren't membes started intervening in our forums in a destructive way...we're a bit worried because some of the technecal topics we might be discussing have important political ramifications, so outsiders might want to mess things up.)

Thanks - Tony