Second day of Dashboard Week that included drafting of a API, and I would say I am basically an expert at APIs now. What trouble I faced today was silly mistakes, data joins and timing (my old nemesis). Todays task was to create a dashboard on Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul using an API. I enjoyed beloved and goofy father Hal from Malcom in the Middle become a badass and complicated chemistry teacher, cancer patient turn drug king pin. Nine years after the series finale, I took my hand at memorializing the series in dashboard form.
First, to get the data from the API.
The overall API was well documented and easy to use. The only issue was Alteryx encoding. I encountered an issue when inputting the URL to filter to a specific series.
The URL from the API was the same as the inputted URL from my workflow but I was getting back no data (see Download Data field).
There was an easy solution for this and I opted to filter the series after downloading data for both series'. But I encountered the same problem when inputting names for each characters kill-count.
I spent far too long trying to troubleshoot, even drafting a batch macro, in case the multiple URLs/GET requests were causing and issue.
In the end, the solution was checking a tick-box for encoding the URL.
In laymen terms, I had already included encoded URL text by adding a '+' between the first and second name. If I have left a space, Alteryx would have encoded the URL for me. So Alteryx was trying to encode, already encoded text and so when requesting data from the API, the names were not recognized and all the kill-counts amounted to zero.
Because of the silly oversight, frustration and the time it took me to ask for help (too long), I condensed my time for dashboarding and so was not able to match my sketch.
Despite the troubles, I enjoy the task and I will be updating and redrafting my dashboard later ready for Tableau Public.