Appropriately, DS43 finished off dashboard week with a dataset involving cocktails. We were tasked with webscrapping data from the CocktailDB.com website, prepping the data and designing a dashboard based on this.
The idea was to web scrap the website using the html (in Alteryx) to get the cocktail names and then incorporating APIs to each of the webpages for the ingredients, instructions and tags. I also wanted to add the images but this proved to be too difficult due to the time constraints involved (as we only had six hours).
The Alteryx work flow is below. The first is the the macro designed to get all cocktails, using three RegEX functions to retrieve the cocktail names from browse pages starting with each letter of the alphabet and, then using two more RegExs to retrieve cocktail IDs which would be used in another work flow to retrieve the ingredients and instructions from each cocktails webpage (second image).
Getting the original html was relatively easy but the struggle was finding the regex functions to retrieve the correct data require which took up the majority of the morning.
Using a macro to retrieve all cocktails took the most time and required a lot of going back an forth to the coaches and other DSs for help to find out why my RegEx functions weren't returning the correct data. Once I got this out of the way, retrieving the ingredients, instructions and tags was a little easier.
Once I had the data, I wasn't sure quite what would be my plan but decided on a how to cocktail making dashboard for others to use where they could choose their own filters and then choose a cocktail to make and step by step guide. The design is below:
However, the final product (found below) was not as detailed as I originally anticipated. I did not have time to include images of the cocktails so users to view what their finished product would look like. I also found when creating the dashboard that in the data retrieval I had only webscraped the names of the ingredients and not the amount used in each cocktail. I also did not get time to create the difficulty level to make the cocktail.
If I had additional time I would have done the following:
- webscrap the amounts used and images to add the dashboard.
- spilt the instructions into a step by step guide for better visualisation and include the type of glass that should be used
Overall, this was a difficult challenge for me but gave me some additional experience in designing macros and webscrapping which will be helpful in the future.