Design BIRT Reports on FTP Data

The CData JDBC Driver for FTP integrates connectivity to FTP APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for FTP 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 FTP or SFTP servers, specify at least RemoteHost and FileProtocol. Specify the port with RemotePort.

   Set User and Password to perform Basic authentication. Set SSHAuthMode to use SSH authentication. See the Getting Started section of the data provider help documentation for more information on authenticating via SSH.

   Set SSLMode and SSLServerCert to secure connections with SSL.

   The data provider lists the tables based on the available folders in your FTP server. Set the following connection properties to control the relational view of the file system:

   • RemotePath: Set this to the current working directory.
   • TableDepth: Set this to control the depth of folders to list as views.
   • FileRetrievalDepth: Set this to retrieve and list files recursively from the root table.

   Stored Procedures are available to download files, upload files, and send protocol commands. See the Data Model chapter of the FTP data provider documentation for more information.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

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

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.ftp.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:ftp:RemoteHost=MyFTPServer;
   

7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for FTP.
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 Filesize, Filename FROM MyDirectory
   

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 FTP 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.