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The Confluence ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Confluence, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Confluence data like you would a database - read, write, and update Confluence Attachments, Comments, Groups, Users, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Confluence Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze Confluence data in Microsoft R Open.

Access Confluence data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Confluence and the RODBC package to work with remote Confluence data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Confluence data and visualize Confluence data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Confluence as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Confluence follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Obtaining an API Token

An API token is necessary for account authentication. To generate one, login to your Atlassian account and navigate to API tokens > Create API token. The generated token will be displayed.

Connect Using a Confluence Cloud Account

To connect to a Cloud account, provide the following (Note: Password has been deprecated for connecting to a Cloud Account and is now used only to connect to a Server Instance.):

  • User: The user which will be used to authenticate with the Confluence server.
  • APIToken: The API Token associated with the currently authenticated user.
  • Url: The URL associated with your JIRA endpoint. For example, https://yoursitename.atlassian.net.

Connect Using a Confluence Server Instance

To connect to a Server instance, provide the following:

  • User: The user which will be used to authenticate with the Confluence instance.
  • Password: The password which will be used to authenticate with the Confluence server.
  • Url: The URL associated with your JIRA endpoint. For example, https://yoursitename.atlassian.net.

When you configure the DSN, 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.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Confluence in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData Confluence Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Confluence Description = My Description User = admin APIToken = myApiToken Url = https://yoursitename.atlassian.net Timezone = America/New_York

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Confluence Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData Confluence Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Confluence APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Confluence API.

pages <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Key, Name FROM Pages WHERE Id = '10000'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(pages)

Plot Confluence Data

You can now analyze Confluence data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(pages$Name, main="Confluence Pages", names.arg = pages$Key, horiz=TRUE)