Create a Data Access Object for Figshare Data using JDBI

JDBI is a SQL convenience library for Java that exposes two different style APIs, a fluent style and a SQL object style. The CData JDBC Driver for Figshare integrates connectivity to live Figshare data in Java applications. By pairing these technologies, you gain simple, programmatic access to Figshare data. This article explains how to build a basic Data Access Object (DAO) and the accompanying code to read Figshare data.

Create a DAO for the Figshare InstitutionAccountGroupRoles Entity

The interface below declares the desired behavior for the SQL object to create a single method for each SQL statement to be implemented.

public interface MyInstitutionAccountGroupRolesDAO {
  //request specific data from Figshare (String type is used for simplicity)
  @SqlQuery("SELECT Id FROM InstitutionAccountGroupRoles WHERE Category = :category")
  String findIdByCategory(@Bind("category") String category);

  /*
   * close with no args is used to close the connection
   */
  void close();
}

Open a Connection to Figshare

Collect the necessary connection properties and construct the appropriate JDBC URL for connecting to Figshare.

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

Figshare API Profile Settings

Personal API tokens can be created and managed from the Applications page in your Figshare account settings.

Built-in Connection String Designer

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

A connection string for Figshare will typically look like the following:

jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\Figshare.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_token';

Use the configured JDBC URL to obtain an instance of the DAO interface. The particular method shown below will open a handle bound to the instance, so the instance needs to be closed explicitly to release the handle and the bound JDBC connection.

DBI dbi = new DBI("jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\Figshare.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_token';");
MyInstitutionAccountGroupRolesDAO dao = dbi.open(MyInstitutionAccountGroupRolesDAO.class);

//do stuff with the DAO

dao.close();

Read Figshare Data

With the connection open to Figshare, simply call the previously defined method to retrieve data from the InstitutionAccountGroupRoles entity in Figshare.

//disply the result of our 'find' method
String id = dao.findIdByCategory("researcher");
System.out.println(id);

Since the JDBI library is able to work with JDBC connections, you can easily produce a SQL Object API for Figshare by integrating with the CData JDBC Driver for Figshare. Download a free trial and work with live Figshare data in custom Java applications today.