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

Access PayPal Transactions, Orders, Sales, Invoices, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze PayPal Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze PayPal data in Microsoft R Open.

Access PayPal data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for PayPal and the RODBC package to work with remote PayPal data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to PayPal data and visualize PayPal data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to PayPal as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to PayPal follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

The provider surfaces tables from two PayPal APIs. The APIs use different authentication methods.

  • The REST API uses the OAuth standard. To authenticate to the REST API, you will need to set the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL properties.
  • The Classic API requires Signature API credentials. To authenticate to the Classic API, you will need to obtain an API username, password, and signature.

See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to obtaining the necessary API credentials.

To select the API you want to work with, you can set the Schema property to REST or SOAP. By default the SOAP schema will be used.

For testing purposes you can set UseSandbox to true and use sandbox credentials.

When you configure the DSN, 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.

Windows

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.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for PayPal in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData PayPal Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for PayPal Description = My Description Schema = SOAP Username = sandbox-facilitator_api1.test.com Password = xyz123 Signature = zx2127

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to PayPal Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData PayPal Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models PayPal APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the PayPal API.

transactions <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Date, GrossAmount FROM Transactions", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(transactions)

Plot PayPal Data

You can now analyze PayPal data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(transactions$GrossAmount, main="PayPal Transactions", names.arg = transactions$Date, horiz=TRUE)