Analyze Microsoft Planner Data in R via ODBC

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

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

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.
• 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 Driver opens the MS Planner OAuth endpoint in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions to the Driver. The Driver then completes the OAuth process.

1. Extracts the access token from the callback URL and authenticates requests.
2. Obtains a new access token when the old one expires.
3. Saves OAuth values in OAuthSettingsLocation to be persisted across connections.

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 Microsoft Planner 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 MicrosoftPlanner Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Microsoft Planner
Description = My Description
OAuthClientId = MyApplicationId
OAuthClientSecret = MySecretKey
CallbackURL = http://localhost:33333
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 Microsoft Planner Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData MicrosoftPlanner Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Microsoft Planner 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 Microsoft Planner API.

tasks <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT TaskId, startDateTime FROM Tasks WHERE TaskId = 'BCrvyMoiLEafem-3RxIESmUAHbLK'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(tasks)

Plot Microsoft Planner Data

You can now analyze Microsoft Planner 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(tasks$startDateTime, main="Microsoft Planner Tasks", names.arg = tasks$TaskId, horiz=TRUE)

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