Use the CData ODBC Driver for BambooHR in SAS JMP

You can use the CData ODBC Driver for BambooHR to integrate live data into your statistical analysis with SAS JMP. The driver proxies your queries directly to the BambooHR API, ensuring that your analysis reflects any changes to the data. The CData ODBC Driver supports the standard SQL used by JMP in the background as you design reports.

This article shows how to access BambooHR data into a report and create data visualization. It also shows how to use SQL to query BambooHR data from the JMP Query Builder.

Access BambooHR Data as an ODBC Data Source

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.

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.

Import BambooHR Data with the Query Builder

After you have created the BambooHR DSN, you can use SQL to invoke the capabilities of the BambooHR API. Follow the steps below to execute some supported queries in the Query Builder:

1. In SAS JMP, click File -> Database -> Query Builder. The Select Database Connection dialog is displayed.
2. Click New Connection.
3. On the Machine Data Source tab, select the DSN. In the next step, the Select Tables for Query dialog is displayed.
4. In the Available Tables section, select a table and click Primary.
5. As you drag Available Columns to the Included Columns tab, the underlying SQL query is updated.
6. Click Run Query to display the data.
7. To refresh the results with the current data, right-click Update from Database and click Run Script.

Visualize BambooHR Data

After importing, you can use the Graph Builder to create graphs visually. To open the Graph Builder, click the Graph Builder button in the toolbar.

1. Drag a dimension column onto the x axis. For example, Id.
2. Drag a measure column onto the y axis. For example, DisplayName.
3. Select a chart type. For example, a bar chart.