Day 2 of Dashboard week, and it’s about battlefields in the UK. It certainly was a battle to get the data out of the website. Hahaha.

The first steps of webscraping this website seemed fine, until you realise that the structure for each battlefield web page varies ever so slightly.

Additionally, every time we ran our workflows, the number of calls to the website increased, and eventually we were losing data due to a “too many calls” error so I had to add a throttle tool to slow things down. (and let me make myself a coffee)

Also to get the numeric values out of the key facts required some creative thinking. I eventually just extracted a total number out that is correct for 90% of the battles and within error for the rest.

Here is the Alteryx workflow that took up most of the day.

The dashboard itself was also challenging as there was just a lot of string fields and a lot of text to describe the battles. So I built a timeline and the rest of the dashboard came together around that.

AND another caveat was that we could only use Tableau 10.0.22 – which restricted a lot of what we could do with our dashboards. (Basically the interactivity goes down – way down)

Here is the final dashboard I came up with