Analyze Reckon Accounts Hosted Data in R via ODBC

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

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

The connector makes requests to Reckon Accounts Hosted through OAuth. Specify the following connection properties:

• SubscriptionKey: Required. You get this value when you created your developer account.
• CountryVersion: Defaults to 2021.R2.AU.
• CompanyFile: Required. The path to the company file.
• User: Required. The username of the company file.
• Password: Required. The password of the company file.
• InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH to let the driver handle access tokens.
• CallbackURL: The redirectURI of your Custom OAuth App.
• OAuthClientId: The client id of your Custom OAuth App.
• OAuthClientSecret: The client secret of your Custom OAuth App.

CData provides an embedded OAuth application that simplifies OAuth desktop authentication. See the Help documentation for information on other OAuth authentication methods (web, headless, etc.), creating custom OAuth applications, and reasons for doing so.

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 Reckon Accounts Hosted 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 ReckonAccountsHosted Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Reckon Accounts Hosted
Description = My Description
SubscriptionKey = my_subscription_key
CountryVersion = 2021.R2.AU
CompanyFile = Q:/CompanyName.QBW
User = my_user
Password = my_password
CallbackURL = http://localhost:33333
OAuthClientId = my_oauth_client_id
OAuthClientSecret = my_oauth_client_secret
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 Reckon Accounts Hosted Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData ReckonAccountsHosted Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Reckon Accounts Hosted 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 Reckon Accounts Hosted API.

accounts <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Name, Balance FROM Accounts WHERE IsActive = 'true'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(accounts)

Plot Reckon Accounts Hosted Data

You can now analyze Reckon Accounts Hosted 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(accounts$Balance, main="Reckon Accounts Hosted Accounts", names.arg = accounts$Name, horiz=TRUE)

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