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ArturoMuñoz
Employee
Employee

Starting with version 12 of QlikView we released a new connector that allowed developers to extend the target data sources available. The Qlik REST Connector provides a means for the Qlik Analytics Platform to efficiently load data into a Qlik Sense or QlikView application from a REST service that returns data in XML, CSV or JSON format.

 

What is REST?

 

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications protocol. RESTful applications use HTTP requests to post, read, and delete data. REST is a lightweight alternative to RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, et al.).

 

More info on REST (Representational state transfer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

 

The Qlik REST Connector

 

The Qlik REST Connector is a generic connector, it is not tailored to a specific REST data source. The requirements for creating connections must be acquired from the specific data sources. Examples for connecting to popular social network platforms are provided in the help documentation.

 

How to get the connector?

 

Get the connectors here: Qlik Connector Packages

 

How it works. Getting Star Wars data

 

If you read the Qlik documentation you will find examples on how to get data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google Analytics.

 

For this post example we are going to get data from this website http://swapi.co/ It contains data from the universe of Star Wars. It uses JSON format to give us access to data about the seven films so we can plot some SW demographics.

 

Because Qlik REST is a generic connector first step to connect to a new data source will always be to carefully read the documentation from the source where the data will be acquired from.

 

I’m interested in getting data from the Characters, in the API documentation web page we can read how to query the requested data.

http://swapi.co/documentation#people

 

  1. Create new connection. Give your connection a name and then fill in the blanks.
    1. Request URL. http://swapi.co/api/people/
    2. Data Options. If you want to specify the output data type, JSON, CSV or XML during the load process you can uncheck it otherwise keep it auto detect.
    3. Key generation strategy will let you define how you want it to generate the table’s keys, I rarely change it from Sequence ID.
    4. Authentication. This API uses no authentication so we can skip that.
    5. Pagination. Qlik REST connector will provide you with standard pagination methods (explained in help page) and Custom pagination that will let you do build your own process.

      If you are looking for more pagination examples please check help page

      For this particular example I will pick Next URL as it comes specified in the API documentation.

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    6. Query parameters & Query headers. For this API we don’t have to specify any further parameter.
  2. We should be good to go (you might want to normalize fields names and so forth) and perform a reload.

 

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I'm attaching the app so you all can check how it's done.

 

Enjoy Qliking

AMZ

http://twitter.com/arturoqv

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