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Connect to Smartsheet Data from Crystal Reports
Use CData Connect Cloud to connect to and report on live Smartsheet data from Crystal Reports.
Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application by SAP designed to help you analyze your data with well-formatted, pixel-perfect, and multi-page reports. When paired with CData Connect Cloud, Crystal Reports gets access to live Smartsheet data. This article demonstrates how to connect to Smartsheet using Connect Cloud and report on Smartsheet data in Crystal Reports.
CData Connect Cloud 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 Cloud 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 Crystal Reports
Connectivity to Smartsheet from Crystal Reports is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with Smartsheet data from Crystal Reports, we start by creating and configuring a Smartsheet connection.
- Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
- Select "Smartsheet" from the Add Connection panel
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Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Smartsheet.
Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to 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)")
- Click Create & Test
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Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Smartsheet Connection page and update the User-based permissions.
![]( "Updating permissions")
Add a Personal Access Token
If you are connecting from a service, application, platform, or framework that does not support OAuth authentication, you can create a Personal Access Token (PAT) to use for authentication. Best practices would dictate that you create a separate PAT for each service, to maintain granularity of access.
- Click on your username at the top right of the Connect Cloud app and click User Profile.
- On the User Profile page, scroll down to the Personal Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
- Give your PAT a name and click Create.
- The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.
Connect to Smartsheet from Crystal Reports using Connect Cloud
To establish a connection from Crystal Reports to CData Connect Cloud, you will need to download the JDBC driver.
- Open the Client Tools page of CData Connect Cloud.
- In the Dev Tools section, click JDBC.
- Download and run the setup file.
- When the installation is complete, locate the JDBC Connect JAR file in the JDBC driver's installation directory, for example, C:\Program Files\CData\JDBC Driver for CData Connect\lib.
- Copy the JDBC Connect JAR file (cdata.jdbc.connect.jar).
After copying the JDBC CData Connect JAR file, you will need to paste it into the Crystal Reports installation location and configure the connection to Connect Cloud.
- Find the installation directory for Crystal Reports, for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\java\lib
- Paste the JDBC Connect JAR file into the Crystal Reports installation directory.
- Go to the parent java folder. For example, C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\java This folder should contain a CRConfig file.
![]( "Locating the CRConfig file in the Crystal Reports installation directory.")
- Open CRConfig in a text editor.
- Add the path to the JDBC CData Connect JAR file in the
of the CRConfig file, for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\java\lib ![]( "Editing the CRConfig file.")
- Log into Crystal Reports and start a blank report.
- In the Database Expert dialog, click Create New Connection.
- Select the JDBC data source and the tables you want to add. Click OK.
![]( "Selecting the JDBC data source.")
- In the Connection dialog, enter the Connection URL (e.g. jdbc:connect:AuthScheme=OAuth;) and Database Classname (e.g. cdata.jdbc.connect.ConnectDriver).
![]( "Configuring the connection.")
- Click Finish. The Database Expert dialog displays all available connections.
![]( "Browsing the available data from Connect Cloud.")
You can now create reports with the connected data.
Get CData Connect Cloud
To get live data access to 100+ SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from Crystal Reports, try CData Connect Cloud today!
