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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/smartsheet-cloud-redash.rst

⇱ Query, Visualize, and Share live Smartsheet Data in Redash

Query, Visualize, and Share live Smartsheet Data in Redash

👁 Mohsin Turki
Mohsin Turki
Technical Marketing Engineer
Use CData Connect AI to connect to live Smartsheet data in Redash for querying, visualizing, and sharing.

Redash is a collaboration tool that lets you query, visualize, and share your data. When paired with CData Connect AI, Redash gets access to live Smartsheet data. This article demonstrates how to connect to Smartsheet using Connect AI and work with live Smartsheet data in Redash.

CData Connect AI provides a pure SQL Server interface for Smartsheet, allowing you to query data from Smartsheet without replicating the data to a natively supported database. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect AI pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc.) directly to Smartsheet, leveraging server-side processing to return the requested Smartsheet data quickly.

About Smartsheet Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Smartsheet. Customers use CData connectivity to:

  • Read and write attachments, columns, comments and discussions.
  • View the data in individuals cells, report on cell history, and more.
  • Perform Smartsheet-specific actions like deleting or downloading attachments, creating, copying, deleting, or moving sheets, and moving or copying rows to another sheet.

Users frequently integrate Smartsheet with analytics tools such as Tableau, Crystal Reports, and Excel. Others leverage our tools to replicate Smartsheet data to databases or data warehouses.


Getting Started


Configure Smartsheet Connectivity for Redash

Connectivity to Smartsheet from Redash is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Smartsheet data in Redash, we start by creating and configuring a Smartsheet connection.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
    2. 👁 Adding a Connection
  2. Select "Smartsheet" from the Add Connection panel
    3. 👁 Selecting a data source
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Smartsheet.

    Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, register an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties.

    However, for testing purposes you can instead use the Personal Access Token you get when you create an application; set this to the OAuthAccessToken connection property.

    👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Smartsheet Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions

Add a Personal Access Token

When connecting to Connect AI through the REST API, the OData API, or the Virtual SQL Server, a Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.

  1. Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
  2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
  3. Give the PAT a name and click Create. 👁 Creating a new PAT
  4. The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to Smartsheet data from Redash.

Connect to Smartsheet from Redash using Connect AI

To establish a connection from Redash to CData Connect AI using the Virtual SQL Server, follow these steps:

  1. Log into Redash.
  2. Click the settings widget on the top right.
  3. Click New Data Source.
  4. Select Microsoft SQL Server as the Data Source Type.
  5. On the configuration tab, set the following properties:
    • Database Name: enter the Connection Name of the CData Connect AI data source you want to connect to (for example, Salesforce1).
    • Server: enter the virtual SQL Server host name (tds.cdata.com)
    • User: enter your CData Connect AI username. This is displayed in the top-right corner of the CData Connect AI interface. For example, [email protected].
    • Password: enter the PAT you generated on the Settings page.
    • Port: enter 14333
    👁 Configuring the connection to Connect AI from Redash.
  6. Click Create.
  7. Click Test Connection to ensure that the connection is configured properly.

You can now work with live Smartsheet data in Redash.

Get CData Connect AI

To get live data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from Redash, try CData Connect AI today!