Design BIRT Reports on Factorial Data

The CData JDBC Driver for Factorial integrates connectivity to Factorial APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Factorial 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.

   Authentication

   Factorial uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication to connect to your HR data or to allow other users to connect to their data.

   Using OAuth Authentication

   To connect using OAuth, follow these steps:

   1. Navigate to your Factorial admin panel and create a new OAuth application.
   2. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret from your application configuration.
   3. Configure the following connection properties:

   After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to OAuth.
   • OAuthClientId: Set this to your OAuth Client ID.
   • OAuthClientSecret: Set this to your OAuth Client Secret.
   • Scope: Set this to specify the data access permissions (default: "read write").

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Factorial 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.

   

   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\Factorial.apip;AuthScheme=OAuth;OAuthClientId=your_client_id;OAuthClientSecret=your_client_secret;CallbackUrl=your_callback_url;
   

7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for Factorial.
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 ,  FROM Agreements WHERE ProcessId = '123'
   

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 Factorial data.

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.