Design BIRT Reports on SuiteCRM Data

The CData JDBC Driver for SuiteCRM integrates connectivity to SuiteCRM APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for SuiteCRM with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.

1. If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
2. Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
3. In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
4. Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
5. Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
6. In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.

   The User and Password properties must be set to valid SuiteCRM user credentials. Additionally, specify the URL to the SuiteCRM application, for example http://suite.crm.com.

   Note that retrieving SuiteCRM metadata can be expensive. It is advised that you store the metadata locally as described in the Caching Metadata section of the data provider help documentation.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the SuiteCRM JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.suitecrm.jar
   

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)
   

   When you configure the JDBC URL, 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.

   A typical JDBC URL is below:

   jdbc:suitecrm:URL=http://mySuiteCRM.com;User=myUser;Password=myPassword;
   

7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for SuiteCRM.
8. In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query:

   SELECT Name, Industry FROM Accounts
   

9. In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
10. After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
11. Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.

Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to SuiteCRM data. 👁 A BIRT report that can be refreshed on demand. (Salesforce is shown.)

To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.