Design BIRT Reports on Bing Search Results

The CData JDBC Driver for Bing Search integrates connectivity to Bing Search APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Bing Search with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.

1. If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
2. Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
3. In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
4. Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
5. Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
6. In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.

   To connect to Bing, set the ApiKey connection property. To obtain the API key, sign into Microsoft Cognitive Services and register for the Bing Search APIs.

   Two API keys are then generated; select either one.

   When querying tables, the SearchTerms parameter must be supplied in the WHERE clause.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Bing Search JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.bing.jar

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   When you configure the JDBC URL, 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.

   A typical JDBC URL is below:

   jdbc:bing:APIKey=MyAPIKey;
7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for Bing Search.
8. In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query: SELECT Title, ViewCount FROM VideoSearch WHERE SearchTerms = 'WayneTech'
9. In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
10. After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
11. Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.

Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to Bing Search results.

To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.