Design BIRT Reports on PDFMonkey Data

The CData JDBC Driver for PDFMonkey integrates connectivity to PDFMonkey APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for PDFMonkey with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.

1. If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
2. Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
3. In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
4. Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
5. Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
6. In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.

   Using API Key Authentication

   PdfMonkey uses API key authentication. To obtain an API key:

   1. Log in to your PdfMonkey account at https://app.pdfmonkey.io
   2. Navigate to your account settings
   3. Open the API Key page
   4. Copy your API key

   After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
   Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:
   • APIKey: Set this to your PdfMonkey API key.

   Example Connection String

   Profile=C:\profiles\PdfMonkey.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings="APIKey=your_api_key"
   

   Connecting to PdfMonkey

   Once the authentication is configured, you can connect to PdfMonkey and query data from any of the available tables such as CurrentUser, DocumentCards, Documents, DocumentTemplateCards, and DocumentTemplates.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

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

   

   When you configure the JDBC URL, 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.

   A typical JDBC URL is below:

   jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\PdfMonkey.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings="APIKey=your_api_key"
   

7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for PDFMonkey.
8. In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query:

   SELECT ,  FROM CurrentUser WHERE  = ''
   

9. In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
10. After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
11. Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.

Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to PDFMonkey data.

To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.