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

Access Epicor Kinetic like you would a database - read, write, and update Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Accounts, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Epicor Kinetic Data in R


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

Access Epicor Kinetic data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Epicor Kinetic and the RODBC package to work with remote Epicor Kinetic 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 Epicor Kinetic data and visualize Epicor Kinetic 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 Epicor Kinetic as an ODBC Data Source

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

To successfully connect to your ERP instance, you must specify the following connection properties:

  • Url:the URL of the server hosting your ERP instance. For example, https://myserver.EpicorSaaS.com
  • ERPInstance: the name of your ERP instance.
  • User: the username of your account.
  • Password: the password of your account.
  • Service: the service you want to retrieve data from. For example, BaqSvc.

In addition, you may also set the optional connection properties:

  • ApiKey: An optional key that may be required for connection to some services depending on your account configuration.
  • ApiVersion: Defaults to v1. May be set to v2 to use the newer Epicor API.
  • Company: Required if you set the ApiVersion to v2.

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 Epicor Kinetic 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 epicorKinetic Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Epicor Kinetic Description = My Description Service = Erp.BO.CustomerSvc ERPInstance = MyInstance URL = https://myaccount.epicorsaas.com User = username Password = password

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 Epicor Kinetic Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData epicorKinetic Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Epicor Kinetic 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 Epicor Kinetic API.

customers <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT CustNum, Company FROM Customers WHERE CompanyName = 'CompanyName'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(customers)

Plot Epicor Kinetic Data

You can now analyze Epicor Kinetic 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(customers$Company, main="Epicor Kinetic Customers", names.arg = customers$CustNum, horiz=TRUE)