Product Information > JADE External Interface Developer’s Reference > Chapter 2 - Using External Interfaces > Accessing an External Relational Database from JADE

Accessing an External Relational Database from JADE

You can access the relational database using the JADE language and by navigating relationships using inverse references; for example, you can code the following style of iterative access.

foreach emp in dept.employees do
    emp.display;
endforeach;

This code uses the external iterator and an external collection. The external collection issues the required SQL query to create a virtual collection of instances; that is, the rows of the employee table, where employee.dept_id = department.dept_id. The dept_id foreign key is obtained from the virtual department instance, which is the parent of the virtual employee dictionary.

The ExternalIterator class implements the standard iterator protocol; that is, the next and back methods, and so on.

The external iterator and external collections enable constructs like the foreach instruction to function in a transparent fashion.