Build Printful-Connected Dashboards in Redash

Redash lets you connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to Printful data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to create a virtual database for Printful and build visualizations from Printful data in Redash.

CData Connect Server provides a pure SQL Server interface for Printful, allowing you to easily build reports from live Printful data in Redash — without replicating the data to a natively supported database. As you build visualizations, Redash generates SQL queries to gather data. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Server pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Printful, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return the requested Printful data.

Create a Virtual SQL Server Database for Printful Data

CData Connect Server uses a straightforward, point-and-click interface to connect to data sources and generate APIs.

1. Login to Connect Server and click Connections.
2. Select "Printful" from Available Data Sources.
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Printful.

   Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Printful Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Printful.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Printful (see below).

   Printful API Profile Settings

   In order to authenticate to Printful, you'll need to provide your API Key. To get your API Key, first go to 'Settings' then 'Stores'. Select the Store you would like to connect to, then click the 'Add API Access' button to generate an API Key. Set the API Key in the ProfileSettings property to connect.

4. Click Save Changes
5. Click Privileges -> Add and add the new user (or an existing user) with the appropriate permissions.

With the virtual database created, you are ready to connect to Printful data from Redash.

Visualize Printful Data in Redash

The steps below outline creating a new data source in Redash based on the virtual Printful database in Connect Server and building a simple visualization from the data.

Create a New Data Source

1. Log into Redash, click on your profile and click "Data Sources"
2. Click the " New Data Source" button
3. Select "Microsoft SQL Server" as the Data Source Type
4. On the configuration tab, set the following properties:
   • Name: Name the data source (e.g. Printful (CData Connect))
   • Host: The full URL to your CData Connect instance (e.g. https://connect_server_url)
   • Port: The port of the CData Connect SQL Server endpoint (e.g. 1433)
   • User: A CData Connect user
   • Password: The password for the above user
   • Database name: The name of the virtual database for Printful (e.g. API1)
   • Click the checkbox to Use SSQL
5. Click Create
6. Click the "Test Connection" button to ensure you have configured the connection properly

With the new Data Source created, we are ready to visualize our Printful data.

Create a Printful Data Visualization

1. Click Create -> New Query
2. Select the newly created Data Source (you can explore the data structure in the New Query wizard)
3. Write a SQL statement to retrieve the data, for example:
   SELECT Id, Store FROM Orders WHERE Status = 'inprocess'
4. Click the "Execute" button to load Printful data into Redash via CData Connect
5. Use the Visualization Editor to create and analyze graphs from Printful data
6. You can schedule the query to refresh and update the visualization periodically

SQL Access to Printful Data from Cloud Applications

At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to Printful data from Redash. You can create new visualizations, build dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining SQL access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like Redash, refer to our Connect Server page.