Our recent partnership with CData enhances JReport’s connectivity to Salesforce.com (along with many other data sources) enabling live data access from dashboards and reports. The Data JDBC driver allows JReport to query data using SQL. This article details the process for connecting JReport to Salesforce.com as a JDBC data source to start creating dashboards and reports.
Establishing a Connection
Establishing a connection is the first step to connecting to Salesforce.com. Please refer to our documentation to set this up.
- Create catalog
- Configure connection settings
- Driver: Be sure that the Driver box is checked and fill in the name of the class for the driver: cdata.jdbc.salesforce.SalesforceDriver
- URL: Enter the JDBC URL. This starts with jdbc:salesforce:and is followed by a semicolon-separated list of connection properties. Below is a typical JDBC URL: jdbc:salesforce:User=username;Password=password;SecurityToken=Your_Security_Token;
- Browse and import table information
Creating Your Metadata
- Create query and data mashup (See Documentation)
- Create business view (See Documentation)
Your First Report Component
Creating a report component is standard functionality with JReport. Please refer to our documentation on the process for designing reports.
Your First Dashboard
Creating dashboards is standard functionality with JReport. Please refer to our documentation on the process for designing dashboards.
Summary
Prior to the CData Software drivers, if you wanted to retrieve data from Salesforce.com to create your own dashboard or report, you had to implement your own application by understanding Salesforce.com’s web service interface. In the event Salesforce.com changes or upgrades their service command, you had to modify your code.
Now with CData, their JDBC driver wraps Salesforce.com’s web service as a general relational database, simplifying the entire process. JReport supports JDBC connections and now users can leverage JReport’s full capabilities and robust technology to work with Salesforce.com as a data source without adding even a single line of extra code.
There also no need for JReport to monitor any updates to Salesforce.com since CData Software handles that. During our certification process, the only challenge we encountered was the lack of SQL joins among two or more tables, so we used JReport’s data mashup functionality to join the individual tables using the CData Software JDBC connection locally. We then used JReport’s parameter features to control the result set in order to gain the best performance.
Try JReport and CData today by downloading JReport here and referring to CData documentation here.
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