Create Reports from Workday Data in Looker Studio

Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, empowers users to craft customized reports featuring data visualizations that can be shared with clients while reflecting your brand identity. When combined with CData Connect Cloud, you gain immediate cloud-to-cloud access to Workday data to create visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article provides step-by-step instructions on establishing a virtual database for Workday and generating reports from Workday data within Looker Studio.

CData Connect Cloud offers a seamless cloud-to-cloud interface tailored for Workday, making it straightforward to construct reports directly from live Workday data within Looker Studio without the need for data replication. As you create visualizations, Looker Studio generates queries to retrieve data. With its inherent optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect Cloud efficiently channels all supported query operations, including filters, JOINs, and more, directly to Workday. This leverages server-side processing to swiftly provide the requested Workday data.

Configure Workday Connectivity for Looker Studio

Connectivity to Workday from Looker Studio is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with Workday data from Looker Studio, we start by creating and configuring a Workday connection.

1. Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
2. Select "Workday" from the Add Connection panel
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Workday.

   To connect, there are three pieces of information required: Authentication, API URL, and WSDL URL.

   Authentication

   To authenticate, specify your User and Password. Note that you must append your Tenant to your User separated by an '@' character. For instance, if you normally log in with 'geraldg' and your Tenant is 'mycompany_mc1', then your User should be specified as 'geraldg@mycompany_mc1'.

   API URL

   The API URL may be specified either directly via APIURL, or it may be constructed from the Tenant, Service, and Host. The APIURL is constructed in the following format: <Host>/ccx/service/<Tenant>/<Service>.

   WSDL URL

   The WSDLURL may be specified in its entirety, or may be constructed from the Service and WSDLVersion connection properties. The WSDLURL is constructed in the following format: https://community.workday.com/sites/default/files/file-hosting/productionapi/<Service>/<WSDLVersion>/<Service>.wsdl

4. Click Create & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Workday Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to Workday data from Looker Studio.

Visualize Live Workday Data from Looker Studio

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect Cloud from Looker Studio to create a new Workday data source and build a simple visualization from the data.

1. Log into Looker Studio, click data sources, create a new data source, and choose CData Connect Cloud Connector.
2. Click Authorize and allow access to your Google account.
3. Click Authorize to authenticate with your CData Connect Cloud instance
4. In the CData Connect Cloud Connector in Looker Studio select a Connection (e.g. Workday1) and click Next
5. Select a Table (e.g. Workers) or use a Custom Query and click Connect to continue
6. If needed, modify columns, click Create Report, and add the data source to the report.
7. Select a visualization style and add it to the report.
8. Select Dimensions and Measures to customize your visualization.

Live Access to Workday Data from Cloud Applications

Now you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live Workday data from your Looker Studio workbook. You can create more data sources and new visualizations, build reports, and more — all without replicating Workday data.

Try CData Connect Cloud and get real-time data access to 100+ SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications.