Design BIRT Reports on BugHerd Data

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Provide current BugHerd data to your embedded analytics.

The CData JDBC Driver for BugHerd integrates connectivity to BugHerd APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for BugHerd with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.

  1. If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
  2. Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
  3. In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
  4. Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
  5. Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
  6. In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.

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

    BugHerd API Profile Settings

    BugHerd uses HTTP Basic authentication with an API key as the username. To obtain an API key:

    1. Sign in to your BugHerd account at https://www.bugherd.com
    2. Navigate to Settings > General Settings
    3. Locate the API Key section and copy the generated key

    After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.

    Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:

    • APIKey: Set this to your BugHerd API key. The driver uses the key as the Basic auth username and sets the password internally to the literal value 'x' as required by BugHerd.

    Built-in Connection String Designer

    For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the BugHerd JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

    
    java -jar cdata.jdbc.api.jar
    

    Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

    Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)

    When you configure the JDBC URL, 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.

    A typical JDBC URL is below:

    
    jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\BugHerd.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';
    
  7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for BugHerd.
  8. In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query:
    
    SELECT Id, Title FROM Tasks WHERE ProjectId = '519666'
    
  9. In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
  10. After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
  11. Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.

Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to BugHerd data. A BIRT report that can be refreshed on demand. (Salesforce is shown.)

To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.

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