It's day 3 of dashboard week and today we were tasked with extracting data from the Rick and Morty API.
The Rick and Morty API (or ShlaAPI) is a RESTful API based on the television show Rick and Morty. You will have access to about hundreds of characters, images, locations and episodes. The Rick and Morty API is filled with canonical information as seen on the TV show.
How I retrieved the data:
Step 1: Downloading the JSON
To do this, I used a text input tool and pasted the API links for the characters, locations and episodes data. Next I used a download tool to retrieve the data, and finally a JSON parse tool so that all my column names and values were separated.
Step 2: Pagination
Since the API stores data on multiple stages, we need a way to dynamically bring in all current and future pages. To do this I filtered the JSON information data to give me the page URL and total number of pages. Using the total number of pages, I then used the generate rows tool to return a number for each page in the API. Finally using the formula tool, I replaced the current page number (which was fixed on page 2, to now show a new URL for each page).
Step 3: Downloading the updated JSON and preparing it for use in Tableau
The download simple enough since it was a repeat of the first step. To transform the data I used the cross tab tool to ensure I had all necessary columns. Then simply out the data from there. For the characters table, as I wanted to visualise character appearances in episodes, I need to transpose my episode columns into one column and count the number of episode URL links each character had. I then joined this back into the data, removed any duplicated rows and output my 3 tables. Here's what my final workflow looked like:
Dashboard creation:
When building the dashboard I spent quite a lot of time figuring out what I wanted to do. I ended up creating a few different vizzes but didn't deliver on a main focus for my dashboard. One thing I really liked about my viz was the character profiles so if I were to redo it this would be the main focus. Here's what I ended up with:
As a big Rick and Morty fan I really enjoyed this challenge! It was also great to work on retrieving data from an API and test my knowledge after learning how to do it on a client project a couple of weeks ago, I look forward to tomorrows challenge.