Generate your admin backend: Connect to named instance of SQL Server

Help me!
1

Feature(s) impacted

Generate your admin backend

Observed behavior

× Cannot connect to the database due to the following error:
× {“name”:“SequelizeConnectionError”,“parent”:{“message”:“Failed to connect to localhost:1433 - Could not connect (sequence)”,“code”:“ESOCKET”},“original”:{“message”:“Failed to connect to localhost:1433 - Could not connect (sequence)”,“code”:“ESOCKET”}}

Expected behavior

I am expecting to see a message indicating a successful connecction.

Failure Logs

Context

  • Project name: FNOL_Xercor…
  • Team name: …
  • Environment name: …
  • Agent (forest package) name & version: forest-cli 3.1.0 win32-x64 node-v18.12.0
  • Database type: SQL Server 2019 (Named instance)
  • Recent changes made on your end if any: …
2

Hello,

This error occurs because the local CLI is trying to connect to a SQL Server listening on localhost, on port 1443.

This is because by default, when installing forestadmin for the first time, it assumes that you are installing it on a development environment, with a development database.

Do you have access to such database? On which address and port is it accessible?

3

Guillaume,

My company allows our customers to run our application on the current release of SQL Server and up to 2 versions back. Because of this, I often have multiple versions of SQL Server on my PC so I install each one with an explicit “Instance Name” which SQL Server then calls a “Named Instance” as opposed to a “Default Instance”. A Default Instance uses port 1433 by default. That can be changed but rarely is.

By default, a Named Instance is dynamically assigned a port# when the SQL Server services are started. It is also possible to set the port# that a Named Instance will use. I did that and I am now able to connect successfully to my desired database.

There is also an additional service that can be started that will allow a connection to a Named Instance via the default port 1433 but that requires 2 round trips to the server in order to verify the existence of the specified instance and determine its current assigned port#. In theory, I should be able to specify <instance name> in the connection string to make the connection. That didn’t work. I suspect that is because I don’t have the necessary second service running.

Here’s the create command that I was eventually able to make work:

forest projects:create "Xercor FNOL" --databaseConnectionURL "mssql://sa:XXXXXXX@localhost:65535/FNOL_Xercor" --applicationHost "localhost" --applicationPort "3310" --databaseSchema "dbo"

Notice that by providing the specific port# for the desired instance, I did not need to specify the Instance Name in the connection string.

I’m a bit disappointed that the discovery process only builds objects for the tables and not for the views and synonyms. I did some reading and found a page that discusses manually creating the necessary files to add views to my set of useable objects. That will be my next task.