Analyze ADP Data in R via ODBC

Access ADP data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for ADP and the RODBC package to work with remote ADP 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 ADP data and visualize ADP 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 ADP as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to ADP follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Connect to ADP by specifying the following properties:

• OAuthClientId: The client Id of the custom OAuth application you obtained from ADP.
• OAuthClientSecret: The custom OAuth application's client secret.
• SSLClientCert: Set this to the certificate provided during registration.
• SSLClientCertPassword: Set this to the password of the certificate.
• UseUAT: The connector makes requests to the production environment by default. If using a developer account, set UseUAT = true.
• RowScanDepth: The maximum number of rows to scan for the custom fields columns available in the table. The default value will be set to 100. Setting a high value may decrease performance.

The connector uses OAuth to authenticate with ADP. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with ADP using the browser. OAuth access can be configured in ADP through ADP API Central. For more information, refer ADP's API Central Quick Start Guide and the OAuth section in CData's Help documentation.

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 ADP 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 ADP Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for ADP
Description = My Description
OAuthClientId = YourClientId
OAuthClientSecret = YourClientSecret
SSLClientCert = 'c:\cert.pfx'
SSLClientCertPassword = 'admin@123'
InitiateOAuth = GETANDREFRESH

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 ADP Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData ADP Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models ADP 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 ADP API.

workers <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT AssociateOID, WorkerID FROM Workers WHERE AssociateOID = 'G3349PZGBADQY8H8'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(workers)

Plot ADP Data

You can now analyze ADP 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(workers$WorkerID, main="ADP Workers", names.arg = workers$AssociateOID, horiz=TRUE)

👁 A basic bar plot. (Salesforce is shown.)