Natively Connect to SageHR Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for SageHR into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build SageHR-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to SageHR 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.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the SageHR Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\SageHR.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for SageHR (see below).

SageHR API Profile Settings

Navigate to Settings > Integrations > API in your SageHR account and click Enable API Access to obtain your API key. Your Subdomain is the prefix of your SageHR URL.

Establish a Connection

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API 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.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($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 ApplicantActions WHERE ApplicantId = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM ApplicantActions WHERE ApplicantId = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('12345'));
  

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT ApplicantId, Action FROM ApplicantActions WHERE ApplicantId = '12345'");
  

Process Results

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SageHR data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT ApplicantId, Action FROM ApplicantActions WHERE ApplicantId = '12345'");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["ApplicantId"] . "\n";
}

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SageHR data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM ApplicantActions WHERE ApplicantId = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('12345'));
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 SageHR-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.