ew view option dialog, I was presented with my list of tables in the Chinook database. Each table to was prefixed with [VDC]chinook_mysql, the module and connection name.

I created a table display for the data. To make the View more useful to end users I added an exposed filter on the City column. You can see the View for yourself here.

Conclusion

VDC made the process of incorporating some external data into Drupal simple. The none full-time PHP developer like is grateful to the module developer I didn’t have to write code which I was going to struggle to maintain. From a BI perspective this means I can focus most of my energy on structuring my DW, a challenge on its own. For organisations with different applications running on different databases, VDC enables you to continue running your separate applications but present all information from the different systems in Drupal. Such functionality is very useful in Intranet applications. Once your external data is in Views, you will be able to use the Views-related contributed modules. In my next blog post I am going to see which Views add-ons can be used to make Views a viable BI platform in conjunction with VDC.

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