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Natively Connect to FreshBooks Data in PHP

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The FreshBooks ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from FreshBooks, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access FreshBooks data like you would a database - read, write, and update FreshBooks Customers, Transactions, Invoices, Sales Receipts, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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The CData ODBC driver for FreshBooks enables you to create PHP applications with connectivity to FreshBooks data. Leverage the native support for ODBC in PHP.

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build FreshBooks-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to FreshBooks data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

To connect to FreshBooks, you can set the CompanyName and Token connection properties. Alternatively, you can use the OAuth authentication standard.

OAuth can be used to enable other users to access their own company data. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to obtain the OAuthClientId and OAuthClientSecret by registering an app. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to FreshBooks by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC FreshBooks Source","user","password"); ... odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Clients WHERE Email = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Clients WHERE Email = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('Captain Hook'));

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Username, Credit FROM Clients");

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Username, Credit FROM Clients"); while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){ echo $row["Username"] . "\n"; }

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Clients WHERE Email = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('Captain Hook')); if($success) odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are FreshBooks-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.