Visualize Salesforce Marketing Data in TIBCO Spotfire through ADO.NET

This article walks you through using the CData ADO.NET Provider for Salesforce Marketing in TIBCO Spotfire. You will establish a connection and create a simple dashboard.

1. Add the CData ADO.NET data source by clicking Add Data Tables.
2. Click Add -> Database.
3. Select the provider and click Configure.
4. Define the connection settings. Below is a typical connection string:

   User=myUser;Password=myPassword;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH

   Authenticating to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

   Set the User and Password to your login credentials, or to the credentials for a sandbox user if you are connecting to a sandbox account.

   Connecting to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

   By default, the data provider connects to production environments. Set UseSandbox to true to use a Salesforce Marketing Cloud sandbox account.

   The default Instance is s7 of the Web Services API; however, if you use a different instance, you can set Instance.

   When you configure the connection, 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.

5. Select the tables that you want to add to the dashboard. This example uses Subscriber. You can also specify an SQL query. The driver supports the standard SQL syntax.
6. If you want to work with the live data, click the Keep Data Table External option. This option enables your dashboards to reflect changes to the data in real time.

   If you want to load the data into memory and process the data locally, click the Import Data Table option. This option is better for offline use or if a slow network connection is making your dashboard less interactive.

7. After adding tables, the Recommended Visualizations wizard is displayed. When you select a table, Spotfire uses the column data types to detect number, time, and category columns. This example uses Status in the Numbers section and Id in the Categories section.

After adding several visualizations in the Recommended Visualizations wizard, you can make other modifications to the dashboard. For example, you can apply a filter: After clicking the Filter button, the available filters for each query are displayed in the Filters pane.