Integrate Telegram Data in the Pentaho Report Designer

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Publish reports based on Telegram data in the Pentaho BI tool.

The CData JDBC driver for Telegram data enables access to live data from dashboards and reports. This article shows how to connect to Telegram data as a JDBC data source and publish reports based on Telegram data in Pentaho.

Connect and Create a Report

  1. Copy the JAR file of the driver, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory, to the \Report-Designer\lib\jdbc\ folder in the Pentaho directory.
  2. Run the report-designer.bat file in the \Report-Designer\ folder to open the Report-Designer UI.
  3. Create a new data source with the driver by clicking Data -> Add Data Source -> Advanced -> JDBC (Custom) and then creating a new Telegram connection. In the resulting dialog, configure the connection properties as shown below.

    • Custom Connection URL property: Enter the JDBC URL. This starts with jdbc:api: and is followed by a semicolon-separated list of connection properties.

      Using API Key Authentication

      Telegram uses Bot Tokens to authenticate API requests. You can obtain a Bot Token by creating a bot via BotFather on Telegram (https://t.me/BotFather). Once created, BotFather will provide a token in the format

      123456789:ABCdefGhIJKlmNoPQRsTUVwxyZ
      .

      After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

      • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
      • APIKey: Set this to your Telegram Bot Token obtained from BotFather.

      Example connection string

      Profile=C:\profiles\Telegram.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_bot_token';
      

      Built-in Connection String Designer

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

      Below is a typical JDBC URL:

      jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\Telegram.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_bot_token';
    • Custom Driver Class Name: Enter cdata.jdbc.api.APIDriver.
    • User Name: The username to authenticate with.
    • Password: The password to authenticate with.

Add Telegram Data to a Report

You are now ready to create a report with Telegram data.

  1. Add the Telegram source to your report: Click Data -> Add Data Source -> JDBC and select the data source.

  2. Configure the query. This article uses the one below:

    SELECT ,  FROM AvailableGifts WHERE  = ''
  3. Drag a chart onto your report and double-click it to edit the chart. Run the report to display the chart. You can use the results of this query to create a simple chart for the AvailableGifts table.
  4. Finally, run the report to see the chart.

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Telegram with the API Driver

Connect to Telegram