Design BIRT Reports on HPCC Systems Data

The CData JDBC Driver for HPCC Systems integrates connectivity to HPCC Systems APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for HPCC Systems with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.

1. If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
2. Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
3. In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
4. Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
5. Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
6. In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.

   To connect, set the following connection properties: Set URL to the machine name or IP address of the server and the port the server is running on, for example, https://server:port. The User and Password are required to authenticate to the HPCC Systems cluster specified in the URL. Note that LDAP authentication is not currently supported by our ODBC driver.

   Set Version to the WsSQL Web server version. Note that if you have not already done so, you will need to install the WsSQL service on the HPCC Systems server. The WsSQL Web service is used to interact with the underlying HPCC Systems platform.

   Set Cluster to the target cluster.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the HPCC Systems JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.hpcc.jar

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   

   When you configure the JDBC URL, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

   A typical JDBC URL is below:

   jdbc:hpcc:URL=http://127.0.0.1:8510;User=test;password=xA123456;Version=1;Cluster=hthor;
7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for HPCC Systems.
8. In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query: SELECT SUM(hpcc::test::orders.Price), hpcc::test::customers.CustomerName FROM hpcc::test::orders INNER JOIN hpcc::test::customers ON hpcc::test::orders.CustomerId=hpcc::test::customers.CustomerId;GROUP BY hpcc::test::customers.CustomerName
9. In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
10. After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
11. Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.

Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to HPCC Systems data.

To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.