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

Access Exact Online like you would a database - read, write, and update Accounts, Divisions, Opportunities, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Exact Online Data in R


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

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

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

Exact Online uses the OAuth authentication standard. You can use the embedded OAuth credentials or you can register an OAuth app with Exact to obtain your own. In addition to the OAuth values, provide the Region. If Division is not set, the default Division is determined.

See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for more information.

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 Exact Online 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 ExactOnline Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Exact Online Description = My Description Region = 'United States' Division = 5512

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 Exact Online Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData ExactOnline Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Exact Online 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 Exact Online API.

accounts <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Name, CreditLinePurchase FROM Accounts", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(accounts)

Plot Exact Online Data

You can now analyze Exact Online 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(accounts$CreditLinePurchase, main="Exact Online Accounts", names.arg = accounts$Name, horiz=TRUE)