Create JSON-Connected Visualizations in Klipfolio

Klipfolio is an online dashboard platform for building real-time business dashboards for your team or your clients. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant access to JSON services for visualizations, reports, and more. This article shows how to create a virtual database for JSON in Connect Server and build visualizations from JSON services in Klipfolio.

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

Create a Virtual SQL Server Database for JSON Services

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 "JSON" from Available Data Sources.
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to JSON.

   See the Getting Started chapter in the data provider documentation to authenticate to your data source: The data provider models JSON APIs as bidirectional database tables and JSON files as read-only views (local files, files stored on popular cloud services, and FTP servers). The major authentication schemes are supported, including HTTP Basic, Digest, NTLM, OAuth, and FTP. See the Getting Started chapter in the data provider documentation for authentication guides.

   After setting the URI and providing any authentication values, set DataModel to more closely match the data representation to the structure of your data.

   The DataModel property is the controlling property over how your data is represented into tables and toggles the following basic configurations.

   • Document (default): Model a top-level, document view of your JSON data. The data provider returns nested elements as aggregates of data.
   • FlattenedDocuments: Implicitly join nested documents and their parents into a single table.
   • Relational: Return individual, related tables from hierarchical data. The tables contain a primary key and a foreign key that links to the parent document.

   See the Modeling JSON Data chapter for more information on configuring the relational representation. You will also find the sample data used in the following examples. The data includes entries for people, the cars they own, and various maintenance services performed on those cars.

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 JSON services from Klipfolio.

Connect to JSON in Klipfolio

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect Server from Klipfolio to create a new JSON data source.

1. Open Klipfolio
2. Click in Data Feeds on the left panel to add a new data source.
3. Search for and select MS SQL as the Service.
4. Click "Create a custom MSSQL data source"
5. Configure the data source by setting the SQL Server connection properties:
   • Host: your instance (e.g., CONNECT_SERVER_URL)
   • Port: 1433
   • Database: your database (e.g., JSON1)
   • Driver: MS SQL
   • Username: your Connect Server username
   • Password: your Connect Server password
   • SQL Query: any query to retrieve data (e.g., SELECT * FROM people)
   • Select the checkbox to "Include column headers"
6. Click "Get data" to preview the JSON services before building a data model.

Build a Data Model

After retrieving the data, click "Continue." In the new window, configure your data model.

1. Confirm that the model includes all columns you wish to work with
2. Name your model
3. (optional) Set the Description
4. Set "Header in row" to 1
5. Click the toggle to "Exclude data before row" and set the value to 2
6. Click "Save data feed"

Create a Klip

With the data modeled, we are ready to create a Klip (or visualization) of the data to be used in the Klipfolio platform for dashboards, reporting, and more.

1. Click "Add Metric"
2. Select a measure, placed on the y-axis, to track.
3. Select up to five dimensions/columns, for the x-axis, that you wish to visualize.
4. Click "Save metric"

SQL Access to JSON Services from Applications

Now you have a Klip built from live JSON services. You can add it to a new dashboard, share, and more. Easily create more data sources and new visualizations, produce reports, and more — all without replicating JSON services.

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