Drupal DB2 Integration

We developed a custom DB2 interface for Drupal, enabling University of Ottawa to use Drupal as a bridge between two systems, in this case as a middleware layer for managing notifications to the student portal.

The Drupal DB2 interface uses the PHPDB2 libraries to connect to the IBM DB2 database within a custom Drupal module. All student records are housed in a DB2 database, the Drupal module created stored procedures to call against DB2, using a code generation pattern which would create .inc files for each stored procedure that the DB2 server exposes. Once the procedure is called, Drupal converts the result set to nodes, in this case, courses and sessions were created as Organic Groups and students registered into the courses are added as members of the groups.

Administrators can post messages into the groups, and group content is exposed into feeds, the student portal consumes the feed content, and the messages are delivered to the student messaging portal.

This solution was highly customized, but could be adapted to bridge other DB2 to Drupal needs.