On the Driver Information screen JDBC Drivers can be set up to make it easier to add and edit connections. To do this the 'Example JDBC URL' of the Driver has to identify, or tag, the different parts of the URL and the 'Use Basic Driver Parameters' option has to be selected.
Note: To get to the the Driver Information screen, select the 'Tools' main menu, then select 'Driver Manager' from the menu drop down, then double click on the driver's name.

To edit the 'Example JDBC URL' to support the basic option you will need to locate the different parts of the URL (such as host and port) and surround them with with <> (less than and greater than signs). The text inside the <> segment will be used to label the field on the Connection Configuration screen. These <> segments will be replaced by the values entered in the basic Driver Parameters section of the Connection Configurtion screen to generate the actual JDBC URL that will be used to connect to the database. For example <host> will add a 'Host' field to the basic option screen that will get replaced with what is entered in the field.

If you would like to have a default value pre-populated for a segment you can add '-defaultvalue' to the segment label inside of the <>. For example <host-localhost> will add a 'Host' field to the basic option with a default value of 'localhost'.

If a segment is optional it can be further surrounded by [] (open brace and close brace). The braces can also enclose any other JDBC URL characters that are only needed if the optional segement is being used. For example [;databaseName=<database>] indicates that the 'database' field is optional and if it is entered then add ';databaseName=value' to the JDBC URL. If the field is left blank then the ';databaseName=' part will not be added to the JDB URL.

Example 1

Reference URL:	jdbc:oracle:thin:@host:port:sid
Basic Tagged URL:	jdbc:oracle:thin:@<host>:<port-1521>:<database sid>

This example uses the Oracle driver's Refernece URL where 'host' is the hostname that Oracle is running on, 'port' is the port number it is listening at, and 'sid' is the database service id. The Basic Tagged URL will add 3 fields to the Driver Parameters section of the Driver Information screen: Host, Port (with a default value of 1521), and Database sid.

Example 2

Reference URL:	jdbc:sqlserver://serverName:port;databaseName=<database>
Basic Tagged URL:	jdbc:sqlserver://<host-localhost>:<port-1433>[;databaseName=<database>]

This example uses the Microsoft SQL Server driver's Reference URL where 'serverName' is the hostname that SQL Server is running on, 'port' is the port number it is listening at, and 'database' is an optional parameter to specifiy which database to default to. The Basic Tagged URL will add 3 fields to the Driver Parameters section of the Driver Information screen: Host (with a default value of localhost), Port (with a default value of 1433), and the optional field Database.

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