Connect to Oracle DB using DBCP and tnsnames.ora

Question

I have a Spring-based web app that is running on Tomcat and uses DBCP to connect to Oracle.
The problem:
Need to pull database connection information from tnsnames.ora file. There is Oracle Client installed on a server, so tnsnames file is available.
According to JDBC documentation, the following url should do the trick: jdbc:datadirect:oracle:TNSNamesFile=c:\\oracle\\product\\10.2.0\\NETWORK\\ADMIN\\tnsnames.ora;TNSServerName=FITZGERALD.SALES
This leads to the following declaration in dataAccessContext-local.xml file:
+<bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close">+
+<property name="driverClassName" value="oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver"/>+
+<property name="url" value="jdbc:datadirect:oracle:TNSNamesFile=C:\\oracle\\product\\10.2.0\\db_1\\network\\admin\\tnsnames.ora;TNSServerName=TESTDB"/>+
+<property name="username" value="${jdbc.username}"/>+
+<property name="password" value="${jdbc.password}"/>+
+</bean>+
This doesn&rsquo;t work for me saying that database url is invalid.
Can anyone provide instructions on how to set up DBCP with tnsnames.ora?
Any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You are right, the I got that url may not be correct. I got it from datadirect documentation.
I couldn�t find any good information or examples on this, but I think using TNS keyword-value pairs and tnsnames.ora is supported by type4 Oracle 10g JDBC.
Some info I found in section �Connecting to the Database through the Applet� in JDBC Reference http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/java.102/b14355/jdbcthin.htm#CACCHECD
I guess there is something off in that documentation though. I couldn't get it working.