Analyze Sage 300 Data in R via ODBC

Access Sage 300 data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Sage 300 and the RODBC package to work with remote Sage 300 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 Sage 300 data and visualize Sage 300 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 Sage 300 as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Sage 300 follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Sage 300 requires some initial setup in order to communicate over the Sage 300 Web API.

• Set up the security groups for the Sage 300 user. Give the Sage 300 user access to the option under Security Groups (per each module required).
• Edit both web.config files in the /Online/Web and /Online/WebApi folders; change the key AllowWebApiAccessForAdmin to true. Restart the webAPI app-pool for the settings to take.
• Once the user access is configured, click https://server/Sage300WebApi/ to ensure access to the web API.

Authenticate to Sage 300 using Basic authentication.

Connect Using Basic Authentication

You must provide values for the following properties to successfully authenticate to Sage 300. Note that the provider reuses the session opened by Sage 300 using cookies. This means that your credentials are used only on the first request to open the session. After that, cookies returned from Sage 300 are used for authentication.

• Url: Set this to the url of the server hosting Sage 300. Construct a URL for the Sage 300 Web API as follows: {protocol}://{host-application-path}/v{version}/{tenant}/ For example, http://localhost/Sage300WebApi/v1.0/-/.
• User: Set this to the username of your account.
• Password: Set this to the password of your account.

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 Sage 300 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 Sage300 Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Sage 300
Description = My Description
User = SAMPLE
Password = password
URL = http://127.0.0.1/Sage300WebApi/v1/-/
Company = SAMINC

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 Sage 300 Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData Sage300 Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Sage 300 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 Sage 300 API.

oeinvoices <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT InvoiceUniquifier, ApprovedLimit FROM OEInvoices WHERE AllowPartialShipments = 'Yes'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(oeinvoices)

Plot Sage 300 Data

You can now analyze Sage 300 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(oeinvoices$ApprovedLimit, main="Sage 300 OEInvoices", names.arg = oeinvoices$InvoiceUniquifier, horiz=TRUE)

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