Natively Connect to FreshBooks Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for FreshBooks into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build FreshBooks-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to FreshBooks data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

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.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the FreshBooks Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\FreshBooks.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for FreshBooks (see below).

FreshBooks API Profile Settings

Register an OAuth application in your FreshBooks Developer Dashboard to obtain a Client ID and Client Secret, and configure the redirect URI to match your application's callback URL.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to FreshBooks by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('your_account_id'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, InvoiceNumber FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = 'your_account_id'");
 

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, InvoiceNumber FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = 'your_account_id'");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Id"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FreshBooks data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('your_account_id'));
if($success)
 odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are FreshBooks-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.