How to create Paylocity federated tables in MySQL

You can use the SQL Gateway to configure a MySQL remoting service and set up federated tables for Paylocity data. The service is a daemon process that provides a MySQL interface to the CData ODBC Driver for Paylocity: After you have started the service, you can create a server and tables using the FEDERATED Storage Engine in MySQL. You can then work with Paylocity data just as you would local MySQL tables.

Connect to Paylocity Data

If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

Set the following to establish a connection to Paylocity:

• RSAPublicKey: Set this to the RSA Key associated with your Paylocity, if the RSA Encryption is enabled in the Paylocity account.

  This property is required for executing Insert and Update statements, and it is not required if the feature is disabled.

• UseSandbox: Set to true if you are using sandbox account.
• CustomFieldsCategory: Set this to the Customfields category. This is required when IncludeCustomFields is set to true. The default value for this property is PayrollAndHR.
• Key: The AES symmetric key(base 64 encoded) encrypted with the Paylocity Public Key. It is the key used to encrypt the content.

  Paylocity will decrypt the AES key using RSA decryption.
  It is an optional property if the IV value not provided, The driver will generate a key internally.

• IV: The AES IV (base 64 encoded) used when encrypting the content. It is an optional property if the Key value not provided, The driver will generate an IV internally.

Connect Using OAuth Authentication

You must use OAuth to authenticate with Paylocity. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Paylocity using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the Help documentation.

The Pay Entry API

The Pay Entry API is completely separate from the rest of the Paylocity API. It uses a separate Client ID and Secret, and must be explicitly requested from Paylocity for access to be granted for an account. The Pay Entry API allows you to automatically submit payroll information for individual employees, and little else. Due to the extremely limited nature of what is offered by the Pay Entry API, we have elected not to give it a separate schema, but it may be enabled via the UsePayEntryAPI connection property.

Please be aware that when setting UsePayEntryAPI to true, you may only use the CreatePayEntryImportBatch & MergePayEntryImportBatchgtable stored procedures, the InputTimeEntry table, and the OAuth stored procedures. Attempts to use other features of the product will result in an error. You must also store your OAuthAccessToken separately, which often means setting a different OAuthSettingsLocation when using this connection property.

Configure the SQL Gateway

See the SQL Gateway Overview to set up connectivity to Paylocity data as a virtual MySQL database. You will configure a MySQL remoting service that listens for MySQL requests from clients. The service can be configured in the SQL Gateway UI.

Create a FEDERATED Server and Tables for Paylocity Data

After you have configured and started the service, create a FEDERATED server to simplify the process of creating FEDERATED tables:

Create a FEDERATED Server

The following statement will create a FEDERATED server based on the ODBC Driver for Paylocity. Note that the username and password of the FEDERATED server must match a user account you defined on the Users tab of the SQL Gateway.

CREATE SERVER fedPaylocity
FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER mysql
OPTIONS (USER 'sql_gateway_user', PASSWORD 'sql_gateway_passwd', HOST 'sql_gateway_host', PORT ####, DATABASE 'CData Paylocity Sys');

Create a FEDERATED Table

To create a FEDERATED table using our newly created server, use the CONNECTION keyword and pass the name of the FEDERATED server and the remote table (Employee). Refer to the following template for the statement to create a FEDERATED table:

CREATE TABLE fed_employee (
  ...,
  firstname  TYPE(LEN),
  lastname  TYPE(LEN),
  ...,
)
ENGINE=FEDERATED
DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
CONNECTION='fedPaylocity/employee';

NOTE: The table schema for the FEDERATED table must match the remote table schema exactly. You can always connect directly to the MySQL remoting service using any MySQL client and run a SHOW CREATE TABLE query to get the table schema.

Execute Queries

You can now execute queries to the Paylocity FEDERATED tables from any tool that can connect to MySQL, which is particularly useful if you need to JOIN data from a local table with data from Paylocity. Refer to the following example:

SELECT 
  fed_employee.firstname, 
  local_table.custom_field 
FROM 
  local_table 
JOIN 
  fed_employee 
ON 
  local_table.foreign_firstname = fed_employee.firstname;