URL Syntax

Oracle8i provides universal resource locator (URL) syntax to access services and sessions. The URL lets you use JNDI requests to start up services and sessions, and also to access components published in the database instance. An example service URL is shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1 Service URL

The service URL is composed of four components:

1. The URL prefix followed by a colon and two slashes: sess_iiop:// for a session IIOP request.

2. The system name (the hostname). For example: myPC-1. You can also use localhost or the numeric form of the IP address for the host.

3. The listener port number for IIOP services. The default is 2481.

4. The system identifier (SID)--for example, ORCL--or the service name--for example, mySID.myDomain.
   • SID--The system identifier is defined in your database initialization file as the db_name. This identifies the database instance you are connecting to. If you choose to add the SID to your service URL, the listener will load balance incoming requests across multiple dispatchers for the database instance.

   • Service name--The service name is equivalent to either the service_name or the db_name.db_domain parameters defined in your database initialization file. If you use the service name within your service URL, the listener will load balance incoming requests across multiple database instances: that is, all database instances registered with the listener. This options is good when you are using parallel servers.

     Note: If you do use the service name, you must specify the -useServiceName flag on any tool that takes in the URL. If you do not specify this flag, the tool assumes that the last string is a SID.

Always use colons to separate the hostname, port, and SID or service name.

Note: If you specify a dispatcher port instead of a listener port, and you specify a SID, an ObjectNotFound exception is thrown by the server. Because applications that connect directly to dispatcher ports do not scale well, Oracle does not recommend direct connection to dispatchers.

URL Components and Classes

When you make a connection to Oracle and look up a published object using JNDI, you use a URL that specifies the service (service name, host, port, and SID), as well as the name of a published object to look up and activate. For example, a complete URL could look like:

sess_iiop://localhost:2481:ORCL/:default/projectAurora/Plans816/getPlans

where sess_iiop://localhost:2481:ORCL specifies the service name, :default indicates the default session (when a session has already been established), /projectAurora/Plans816 specifies a directory path in the namespace, and getPlans is the name of a published object to look up.

Note: You do not specify the session name when no session has been established for that connection. That is, on the first look up there is no session active; therefore, :default as a session name has no meaning. In addition, :default is implied, so you can use a URL without a session name.

Each component of the URL represents a Java class. For example, the service name is represented by a ServiceCtx class instance, the session by a SessionCtx instance. See "Using JNDI to Access Bound Objects" and "Session IIOP Service" starting for more information on the service and session names within the URL.

CosNaming Restriction for JNDI Name

The JNDI bound name for the published object must use JNDI syntax rules. The underlying naming service that JServer JNDI uses is CosNaming. Thus, if your name includes a dot (".") in one of the names, the behavior diverges from normal CosNaming rules, as follows:

• The substring before the dot is treated as a CosNaming NameComponent id.

• The substring after the dot is treated as a CosNaming NameComponent kind.

• Both id and kind are concatenated into a full JNDI name.

Normally, in retrieving a CosNaming object, you supply the id and kind as separate entities. The JServer implementation concatenates both id and kind. Thus, to retrieve the object, your application refers to the full name with the dot included as part of the JNDI name, rather than as a separator.

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