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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/dataverse-jdbc-birt.rst

⇱ Design BIRT Reports on Microsoft Dataverse Data

Design BIRT Reports on Microsoft Dataverse Data

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Provide current Microsoft Dataverse data to your embedded analytics.

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

About Microsoft Dataverse Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Microsoft Dataverse (formerly the Common Data Service). Customers use CData connectivity to:

  • Access both Dataverse Entities and Dataverse system tables to work with exactly the data they need.
  • Authenticate securely with Microsoft Dataverse in a variety of ways, including Azure Active Directory, Azure Managed Service Identity credentials, and Azure Service Principal using either a client secret or a certificate.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to manage Microsoft Dataverse entities - listing, creating, and removing associations between entities.

CData customers use our Dataverse connectivity solutions for a variety of reasons, whether they're looking to replicate their data into a data warehouse (alongside other data sources)or analyze live Dataverse data from their preferred data tools inside the Microsoft ecosystem (Power BI, Excel, etc.) or with external tools (Tableau, Looker, etc.).


Getting Started


  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.

    You can connect without setting any connection properties for your user credentials. Below are the minimum connection properties required to connect.

    • InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to avoid repeating the OAuth exchange and manually setting the OAuthAccessToken.
    • OrganizationUrl: Set this to the organization URL you are connecting to, such as https://myorganization.crm.dynamics.com.
    • Tenant (optional): Set this if you wish to authenticate to a different tenant than your default. This is required to work with an organization not on your default Tenant.

    When you connect the Common Data Service OAuth endpoint opens in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions. The OAuth process completes automatically.

    Built-in Connection String Designer

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

    java -jar cdata.jdbc.cds.jar

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

    👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)

    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:cds:OrganizationUrl=https://myaccount.crm.dynamics.com/;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;
  7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for Microsoft Dataverse.
  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 AccountId, Name FROM Accounts WHERE Name = 'MyAccount'
  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 Microsoft Dataverse data. 👁 A BIRT report that can be refreshed on demand. (Salesforce is shown.)

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.