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Certinia Icon Certinia ODBC Driver

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

Access Certinia data like you would a database - read, write, and update Certinia Invoices, Expenses, Accounts, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Certinia Data in R


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

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

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

There are several authentication methods available for connecting to Certinia: login credentials, SSO, and OAuth.

Authenticating with a Login and Token

Set the User and Password to your login credentials. Additionally, set the SecurityToken. By default, the SecurityToken is required, but you can make it optional by allowing a range of trusted IP addresses.

To disable the security token:

  1. Log in to Certinia and enter "Network Access" in the Quick Find box in the setup section.
  2. Add your IP address to the list of trusted IP addresses.

To obtain the security token:

  1. Open the personal information page on certinia.com.
  2. Click the link to reset your security token. The token will be emailed to you.
  3. Specify the security token in the SecurityToken connection property or append it to the Password.

Authenticating with OAuth

If you do not have access to the user name and password or do not want to require them, use the OAuth user consent flow. See the OAuth section in the Help for an authentication guide.

Connecting to Certinia Sandbox Accounts

Set UseSandbox to true (false by default) to use a Certinia sandbox account. Ensure that you specify a sandbox user name in User.

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 Certinia 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 Certinia Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Certinia Description = My Description User = myUser Password = myPassword Security Token = myToken

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 Certinia Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData Certinia Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Certinia 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 Certinia API.

account <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT BillingState, Name FROM Account WHERE Industry = 'Floppy Disks'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(account)

Plot Certinia Data

You can now analyze Certinia 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(account$Name, main="Certinia Account", names.arg = account$BillingState, horiz=TRUE)