Analyze WooCommerce Data in R via ODBC

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

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

WooCommerce supports the following authentication methods: one-legged OAuth1.0 Authentication and standard OAuth2.0 Authentication.

Connecting using one-legged OAuth 1.0 Authentication

Specify the following properties (NOTE: the below credentials are generated from WooCommerce settings page and should not be confused with the credentials generated by using WordPress OAuth2.0 plugin):

• ConsumerKey
• ConsumerSecret

Connecting using WordPress OAuth 2.0 Authentication

After having configured the plugin, you may connect to WooCommerce by providing the following connection properties:

• OAuthClientId
• OAuthClientSecret
• CallbackURL
• InitiateOAuth - Set this to either GETANDREFRESH or REFRESH

In either case, set the Url property to the URL of the WooCommerce instance.

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 WooCommerce 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 WooCommerce Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for WooCommerce
Description = My Description
Url = https://example.com/
 ConsumerKey = ck_ec52c76185c088ecaa3145287c8acba55a6f59ad
 ConsumerSecret = cs_9fde14bf57126156701a7563fc87575713c355e5

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 WooCommerce Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData WooCommerce Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models WooCommerce 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 WooCommerce API.

orders <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT ParentId, Total FROM Orders WHERE ParentId = '3'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(orders)

Plot WooCommerce Data

You can now analyze WooCommerce 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(orders$Total, main="WooCommerce Orders", names.arg = orders$ParentId, horiz=TRUE)