RoboHelp Server 8/MS SQL Server 2008 setup

Report · May 13, 2010

Hi there,

I'm trying to setup and configure RH Server 8 for our documentation group to use, and I've run into a major stumbling block: How do I setup the database in SQL Server 2008 for RH Server to connect to.

I've found many times in the Getting Started Guid, the FAQ, the Help documentation, etc... on how to connect to SQL Server (by setting up a System DSN).

But there is absolutely nothing on how to configure the actual SQL DB to be used (ie, no schema, no account or role information, no minimally required records, etc). Can somsone provide some guidance here?

Thanks,

Scott

Report · May 13, 2010

Hi Scott,

You need not create any database schema. You just need to create an empty database and and a system DSN and configire that for RoboHelp Server using Config Manager and when you restart RoboHelp Server, it will automatically detect that a new database has been configured and it will create the required tables etc. in the database.

Hope this information helps.

Tulika.

Report · May 17, 2010

Hi Tulika,

Thanks for the information, I also assumed (hopefully correctly) that the identity used by the system DSN had to be a dbo on said newly created empty database. Why this is nowhere in any of the documentation though, is somewhat mistifying.

In any case, I've run right into my next problem. Upon restarting Tomcat after making your suggested changes, this shows up in Tomcat's localhost.<date>.log:

14-May-2010 10:50:12 AM org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationContext log
INFO: java.sql.SQLException: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Invalid string or buffer length

After doing a little bit of research, it seems my choice of platform may be the cause. This install of RoboHelp Server 8 is on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard box (and since it's R2, this means it's 64-bit). Additionally, I'm running a 64-bit version of Tomcat 6.0.26 on top of 64-bit JRE 1.6.20. In my research, I found the following:

http://techpubs.borland.com/starteam/2009/en/ST_Readme_en.html

And I've found other evidence to suggest that the JDBC-ODBC bridge is busted for SQL Server on 64-bit Windows in general. The general consensus seems to be use the native JDBC SQL Server driver to work around the problem, but since RoboHelp Server isn't my own project, I can't make this change.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks,

Scott