API means application programming interface. An API is a pipeline to access data from a server. You can use them to communicate with databases, companies often provide APIs to their partners so the company can select what data their partner can access. Permits obtaining only the data you need. Data obtained from an API will often be in JSON format, which needs to be parsed before being opened in Alteryx.
You might be wondering now how do we get that data from JSON into usable data for a gorgeous visualization?
Let's try! I am personally a big sports fan so I will be using this api: https://www.thesportsdb.com/api.php?ref=apilist.fun
I'll try and retrieve information about three players. To use this api, you use this link: https://www.thesportsdb.com/api/v1/json/3/searchplayers.php?p= and after the '=' you add your player name! Be careful, on the web version, spaces are replaced by %20 do not do this on Alteryx!
Now we have to input the links created into a text input tool in Alteryx. One single field, three different rows just filled with the links! We then connect that text input tool to a download tool. This will send the requests to the API to obtain the data. The data will be returned in Jason format.
Next step you want to parse that JSON. This tool will take the JSON field (DownloadData)
However, this format is not what we want, we need to have a column with the name, team, etc. Using a Cross tab we can do this! We just need to group by our field1 (the url) and then pivot the rest.
For those players a fair amount of columns are empty, but anyway that's how you obtain data from an API work using Alteryx.