Analyze SAP SuccessFactors Data in R via ODBC

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

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

You can authenticate to SAP Success Factors using Basic authentication or OAuth with SAML assertion.

Basic Authentication

You must provide values for the following properties to successfully authenticate to SAP Success Factors. Note that the provider will reuse the session opened by SAP Success Factors using cookies. Which means that your credentials will be used only on the first request to open the session. After that, cookies returned from SAP Success Factors will be used for authentication.

• Url: set this to the URL of the server hosting Success Factors. Some of the servers are listed in the SAP support documentation (external link).
• User: set this to the username of your account.
• Password: set this to the password of your account.
• CompanyId: set this to the unique identifier of your company.

OAuth Authentication

You must provide values for the following properties, which will be used to get the access token.

• Url: set this to the URL of the server hosting Success Factors. Some of the servers are listed in the SAP support documentation (external link).
• User: set this to the username of your account.
• CompanyId: set this to the unique identifier of your company.
• OAuthClientId: set this to the API Key that was generated in API Center.
• OAuthClientSecret: the X.509 private key used to sign SAML assertion. The private key can be found in the certificate you downloaded in Registering your OAuth Client Application.
• InitiateOAuth: set this to GETANDREFRESH.

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 SAP SuccessFactors 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 SAPSuccessFactors Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for SAP SuccessFactors
Description = My Description
User = username
Password = password
CompanyId = CompanyId
Url = https://api4.successfactors.com

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 SAP SuccessFactors Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData SAPSuccessFactors Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models SAP SuccessFactors 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 SAP SuccessFactors API.

extaddressinfo <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT address1, zipCode FROM ExtAddressInfo WHERE city = 'Springfield'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(extaddressinfo)

Plot SAP SuccessFactors Data

You can now analyze SAP SuccessFactors 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(extaddressinfo$zipCode, main="SAP SuccessFactors ExtAddressInfo", names.arg = extaddressinfo$address1, horiz=TRUE)

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