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The FreshBooks ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from FreshBooks, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access FreshBooks data like you would a database - read, write, and update FreshBooks Customers, Transactions, Invoices, Sales Receipts, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Using the CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks in PyCharm


Connect to FreshBooks as an ODBC data source in PyCharm using the CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks.

The CData ODBC Drivers can be used in any environment that supports loading an ODBC Driver. In this tutorial we will explore using the CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks from within PyCharm. Included are steps for adding the CData ODBC Driver as a data source, as well as basic PyCharm code to query the data source and display results.

To begin, this tutorial will assume that you have already installed the CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks as well as PyCharm.

Add Pyodbc to the Project

Follow the steps below to add the pyodbc module to your project.

  1. Click File -> Settings to open the project settings window.
  2. Click Project Interpreter from the Project: YourProjectName menu.
  3. To add pyodbc, click the + button and enter pyodbc.
  4. Click Install Package to install pyodbc.

Connect to FreshBooks

You can now connect with an ODBC connection string or a DSN. See the Getting Started section in the CData driver documentation for a guide to creating a DSN on your OS.

To connect to FreshBooks, you can set the CompanyName and Token connection properties. Alternatively, you can use the OAuth authentication standard.

OAuth can be used to enable other users to access their own company data. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to obtain the OAuthClientId and OAuthClientSecret by registering an app. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Below is the syntax for a DSN:

[CData FreshBooks Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks Description = My Description CompanyName = CData Token = token

Execute SQL to FreshBooks

Instantiate a Cursor and use the execute method of the Cursor class to execute any SQL statement.

import pyodbc cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DRIVER={CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks};CompanyName = CData;Token = token;') cursor = cnxn.cursor() cursor.execute("SELECT Username, Credit FROM Clients WHERE Email = 'Captain Hook'") rows = cursor.fetchall() for row in rows: print(row.Username, row.Credit)

After connecting to FreshBooks in PyCharm using the CData ODBC Driver, you will be able to build Python apps with access to FreshBooks data as if it were a standard database. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback regarding this tutorial, please contact us at support@cdata.com.