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Get the Report →Design BIRT Reports on Xero Data
Provide current Xero data to your embedded analytics.
The CData JDBC Driver for Xero integrates connectivity to Xero APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Xero with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.
About Xero Data Integration
Accessing and integrating live data from Xero has never been easier with CData. Customers rely on CData connectivity to:
- Connect to Xero Accounts and both US and Australian Payroll APIs.
- Read, write, update, and delete Xero objects like Customers, Transactions, Invoices, Sales Receipts and more.
- Use SQL stored procedures for actions like adding items to a cart, submitting orders, and downloading attachments.
- Work with accounting, payroll, file, fixed asset, and project data.
Customers regularly integrate their Xero data with preferred tools, like Tableau, Qlik Sense, or Excel, and integrate Xero data into their database or data warehouse.
Getting Started
- If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
- Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
- In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
- Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
- Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
- In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.
To connect, set the Schema connection property in addition to any authentication values. Xero offers authentication for private applications, public applications, and partner applications. You will need to set the XeroAppAuthentication property to PUBLIC, PRIVATE, or PARTNER, depending on the type of application configured. To connect from a private application, you will additionally need to set the OAuthAccessToken, OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, CertificateStoreType, CertificateStore, and CertificateStorePassword.
To connect from a public or partner application, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL, or you can register an app to obtain your own OAuth values.
See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to authenticating to Xero.
Built-in Connection String Designer
For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Xero JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.
java -jar cdata.jdbc.xero.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:xero:InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
- Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for Xero.
- 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 Name, SUM(QuantityOnHand) FROM Items GROUP BY Name
- In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
- After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
- Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.
Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to Xero 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.