Integrate BambooHR Data into Automated Tasks with Power Automate

Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) is an online service that automates events (known as workflows) across the most common apps and services. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to BambooHR data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to connect to Connect Server from Power Automate and integrate live BambooHR data into your workflows and tasks.

CData Connect Server provides a pure SQL interface for BambooHR, allowing you to easily integrate with live BambooHR data in Power Automate — without replicating the data. CData Connect Server looks exactly like a SQL Server database to Power Automate and uses optimized data processing out of the box to push all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to BambooHR, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return BambooHR data.

Create a Virtual SQL Database for BambooHR 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 "BambooHR" from Available Data Sources.
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to BambooHR.

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

   BambooHR API Profile Settings

   In order to authenticate to BambooHR, you'll need to provide your API Key. To generate an API key, log in and click your name in the upper right-hand corner of any page to get to the user context menu. If you have sufficient permissions, there will be an "API Keys" option in that menu to go to the page, where you can create a new API Key. Additionally, you will need to set the Domain, found in the domain name of your BambooHR account. For example if your BambooHR account is acmeinc.bamboohr.com, then the Domain should be 'acmeinc'. Set both the API Key and Domain 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.

Connecting to CData Connect Server

To use Connect Server to integrate BambooHR data into your Power Automate tasks, you need a new SQL Server connection:

1. Log in to Power Automate
2. Click Data -> Connections -> New connection
3. Select SQL Server
4. In the connection wizard:
   
   
   • Set Authentication Type to "SQL Server Authentication"
   • Set SQL server name to the address of your Connect Server instance (connect_server_url)
   • Set SQL database name to the name of the virtual BambooHR database you created earlier (like bamboohrdb)
   • Set the Username and Password and click Create

Integrating BambooHR Data into Power Automate Tasks

With the connection to Connect Server configured, you are ready to integrate live BambooHR data into your Power Automate tasks.

1. Log in to Power Automate
2. Click My flows -> New and choose to create the flow from blank or template
3. Add (or configure) a SQL Server action (like Get rows) and configure the action to connect to your Connect Server connection
4. Select a Table to work with (from the drop-down menu) and configure any advanced options (like filters, orders, etc)
5. Configure any actions to follow and test, then save the flow

SQL Access to BambooHR Data from Applications

Now you have a direct connection to live BambooHR data from Power Automate tasks. You can create more connections and workflows to drive business — all without replicating BambooHR data.

To get SQL data access to 200+ SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your applications, see the CData Connect Server.

Related Power Automate Articles

This article walks through using CData Connect Server with Power Automate (Online). Check out our other articles for more ways to work with Power Automate Desktop:

• BambooHR Data in Power Automate Desktop using CData Connect