Connect to BambooHR Data in Aqua Data Studio

The CData JDBC Driver for BambooHR integrates BambooHR data with wizards and analytics in IDEs like Aqua Data Studio. This article shows how to connect to BambooHR data through the connection manager and execute queries.

Create a JDBC Data Source

You can use the connection manager to define connection properties and save them in a new JDBC data source. The BambooHR data source can then be accessed from Aqua Data Studio tools.

1. In Aqua Data Studio, select Register Server from the Servers menu.
2. In the Register Server form, select the 'Generic - JDBC' connection.
3. Enter the following JDBC connection properties:
   • Name: Enter a name for the data source; for example, BambooHR.
   • Driver Location: Click the Browse button and select the cdata.jdbc.api.jar file, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
   • Driver: Enter the Driver's class name, cdata.jdbc.api.APIDriver.

   • URL: Enter the JDBC URL, which starts with jdbc:api: and is followed by a semicolon-separated list of connection properties.

     Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the BambooHR Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\bamboohr.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for BambooHR (see below).

     BambooHR API Profile Settings

     In order to authenticate to BambooHR, you'll need to provide your API Key. To generate an API key, log in and click your name in the upper right-hand corner of any page to get to the user context menu. If you have sufficient permissions, there will be an "API Keys" option in that menu to go to the page, where you can create a new API Key. Additionally, you will need to set the Domain, found in the domain name of your BambooHR account. For example if your BambooHR account is acmeinc.bamboohr.com, then the Domain should be 'acmeinc'. Set both the API Key and Domain in the ProfileSettings property to connect.

     Built-in Connection String Designer

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

     A typical JDBC URL is below:
     jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\BambooHR.apip;ProfileSettings='Domain=acmeinc;APIKey=your_api_key';

Query BambooHR Data

You can now query the tables exposed.