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Analyze BambooHR Data in R
Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze BambooHR data in Microsoft R Open.
Access BambooHR data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for BambooHR and the RODBC package to work with remote BambooHR data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to BambooHR data and visualize BambooHR data in R.
Install R
You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).
Connect to BambooHR as an ODBC Data Source
Information for connecting to BambooHR follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.
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.
When you configure the DSN, 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.
Windows
If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.
Linux
If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for BambooHR in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.
/etc/odbc.ini
[CData API Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for BambooHR
Description = My Description
Profile = C:\profiles\BambooHR.apip
ProfileSettings = 'Domain = acmeinc
APIKey = your_api_key'
For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).
Load the RODBC Package
To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.
After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:
library(RODBC)
Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.
library(checkpoint)
checkpoint("2016-01-01")
Connect to BambooHR Data as an ODBC Data Source
You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:
conn <- odbcConnect("CData API Source")
Schema Discovery
The driver models BambooHR APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:
sqlTables(conn)
Execute SQL Queries
Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the BambooHR API.
employees <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Id, DisplayName FROM Employees WHERE Department = 'Sales'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)
You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:
View(employees)
Plot BambooHR Data
You can now analyze BambooHR data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:
par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2))
barplot(employees$DisplayName, main="BambooHR Employees", names.arg = employees$Id, horiz=TRUE)
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