Build BambooHR-Connected Dashboards in Redash

Redash lets you connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to BambooHR data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to create a virtual database for BambooHR and build visualizations from BambooHR data in Redash.

CData Connect Server provides a pure SQL Server interface for BambooHR, allowing you to easily build reports from live BambooHR data in Redash — without replicating the data to a natively supported database. As you build visualizations, Redash generates SQL queries to gather data. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Server pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to BambooHR, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return the requested BambooHR data.

Create a Virtual SQL Server Database for BambooHR Data

CData Connect Server uses a straightforward, point-and-click interface to connect to data sources and generate APIs.

1. Login to Connect Server and click Connections.
2. Select "BambooHR" from Available Data Sources.
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to BambooHR.

   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.

4. Click Save Changes
5. Click Privileges -> Add and add the new user (or an existing user) with the appropriate permissions.

With the virtual database created, you are ready to connect to BambooHR data from Redash.

Visualize BambooHR Data in Redash

The steps below outline creating a new data source in Redash based on the virtual BambooHR database in Connect Server and building a simple visualization from the data.

Create a New Data Source

1. Log into Redash, click on your profile and click "Data Sources"
2. Click the " New Data Source" button
3. Select "Microsoft SQL Server" as the Data Source Type
4. On the configuration tab, set the following properties:
   • Name: Name the data source (e.g. BambooHR (CData Connect))
   • Host: The full URL to your CData Connect instance (e.g. https://connect_server_url)
   • Port: The port of the CData Connect SQL Server endpoint (e.g. 1433)
   • User: A CData Connect user
   • Password: The password for the above user
   • Database name: The name of the virtual database for BambooHR (e.g. API1)
   • Click the checkbox to Use SSQL
5. Click Create
6. Click the "Test Connection" button to ensure you have configured the connection properly

With the new Data Source created, we are ready to visualize our BambooHR data.

Create a BambooHR Data Visualization

1. Click Create -> New Query
2. Select the newly created Data Source (you can explore the data structure in the New Query wizard)
3. Write a SQL statement to retrieve the data, for example:
   SELECT Id, DisplayName FROM Employees WHERE Department = 'Sales'
4. Click the "Execute" button to load BambooHR data into Redash via CData Connect
5. Use the Visualization Editor to create and analyze graphs from BambooHR data
6. You can schedule the query to refresh and update the visualization periodically

SQL Access to BambooHR Data from Cloud Applications

At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to BambooHR data from Redash. You can create new visualizations, build dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining SQL access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like Redash, refer to our Connect Server page.