Create Confluence Dashboards in Bold BI

Bold BI allows you to create, share, and collaborate on interactive BI dashboards. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant access to Confluence data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to create a virtual database for Confluence and build reports from Confluence data in Bold BI.

CData Connect Server provides a pure SQL Server interface for Confluence, allowing you to easily build reports from live Confluence data in Bold BI — without replicating the data to a natively supported database. As you build visualizations, Bold BI 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 Confluence, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return the requested Confluence data.

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

   Obtaining an API Token

   An API token is necessary for account authentication. To generate one, login to your Atlassian account and navigate to API tokens > Create API token. The generated token will be displayed.

   Connect Using a Confluence Cloud Account

   To connect to a Cloud account, provide the following (Note: Password has been deprecated for connecting to a Cloud Account and is now used only to connect to a Server Instance.):

   • User: The user which will be used to authenticate with the Confluence server.
   • APIToken: The API Token associated with the currently authenticated user.
   • Url: The URL associated with your JIRA endpoint. For example, https://yoursitename.atlassian.net.

   Connect Using a Confluence Server Instance

   To connect to a Server instance, provide the following:

   • User: The user which will be used to authenticate with the Confluence instance.
   • Password: The password which will be used to authenticate with the Confluence server.
   • Url: The URL associated with your JIRA endpoint. For example, https://yoursitename.atlassian.net.
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 Confluence data from Bold BI.

Visualize Live Confluence Data in Bold BI

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect Server from Bold BI to create a new Confluence data source and build a simple visualization from the data.

1. Log into your Bold BI instance, click the data sources tab, create a new data source, and choose the SQL Server connector.
2. Choose the basic configuration and set the connection properties:
   • Name: Name your connection
   • Server name: Your Connect Server instance (CONNECT_SERVER_URL)
   • Port: 1433
   • Username: Your Connect Server username
   • Password: Your Connect Server password
   • Mode: Choose Live to query Confluence on-demand or choose Extract to load the data into Bold BI
   • Database: Choose the database you created from the drop-down menu (confluencedb)
3. Click Connect
4. Select the table to visualize and drag it onto the workspace.
5. Select a visualization style and add it to the report.
6. Click the gear icon for the visualization to configure the visualization properties and assign columns to the visualization.

SQL Access to Confluence Data from Applications

Now you have a direct connection to live Confluence data from your Bold BI workbook. You can create more data sources and new visualizations, build reports, and more — all without replicating Confluence data.

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