This week is a dashboard week, where we will receive one challenge each day with a different topic.

The first challenge is using the Meal DB API to download, clean, and analyze data for use in a tableau dashboard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 1: Set up an API connection

Before we can begin working with the Meal DB API, we need to set up the connection in Alteryx. To do this, we’ll use the Text Input tool.

 

Drag a Text Input tool to the canvas and enter “URL” as the Column Header and paste the API endpoint URL in the next row. You can choose any endpoint depending on what you are analyzing.

 

Step 2: Download and Parse the data

Now that we’ve established a connection to the API, we can now download and clean the data.

 

Drag the Download tool to the canvas and connect it to the “Text Input” tool.

Use the ‘JSON Parse” tool to connect to the download tool.

Clean the data with the Text to Columns tool and the Filter tool.

 

Step 3: Enhance the data

Now that we’ve cleaned the data. We can further enhance the data by repeating step 2 for the Category endpoint and the ingredients endpoint to the data

 

Step 4: Reshape the data

Once we have the data that we need, we will then need to reshape our data for exploration.

Use the Cross Tab to create new columns and the Transpose tool and create the Ingredient and Measure columns.

Use the Filter tool and the Join tool to join the data and filter tool to remove any empty rows

 

Step 5: Explore in Tableau

Once the data has been exported to a hyper file, it can be imported and analyzed in Tableau.

Find the insights and build the dashboard