Tag Archives: api
Quick-Start Guide for Google Charts API
One-Off Charts
If you just need a beautiful graph to put into a document or post, then the Chart Wizard is the best place to start. You simply choose the type of chart you want, input your data and choose the colours, labels, settings etc, and the wizard generates the URL for you to copy and paste!
The charts are highly configurable and can easily be changed by editing the URL to the image (view the source of this page to see the URL for the chart shown above). This makes it really easy to generate similar-but-different charts in your web applications, by using the wizard and then replacing some relevant parts of it.
Dynamic Charts
As mentioned above, it is very simple to generate charts with Google Charts API – and all the information for generating the chart is on a URL which returns a png file of the resulting chart. This makes it ideal for integrating into our dynamic web applications and charts that are generated are almost overwhelmingly configurable. That said, there are a few key options that will get you started quickly so let’s take a quick tour.
Github API: Issues List
I looked around for some export functionality for github but I got a lot of posts complaining it wasn’t there. Since I hate applications that take your data and refuse to let you remove it, I was disappointed by this news but further inspection showed that although there might be no “export from github” button, there’s an API that more than has it covered. The API returns JSON which is easy to work with from many programming languages, and is perhaps even more powerful and flexible than the simple export I initially expected, so here are some examples.
Adding Multiple Axis Labels to a Google Chart
The axes in Google Charts are a bit interesting, because what they display bears absolutely no resemblance to what data is there – you label the axes separately, even if they are numbers. To label multiple things – in this example a scale and some units, you simply specify the axis more than once. To specify which axes should be shown, use chxt (CHart aXis Title) and set something like this:
&chxt=x,y,y
Then add the labels as required, for example:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxl=1:|Sun|Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat|2:||Week+37
&chxr=0,0,20&chxs=0,676767,11.5,0,lt,676767&chxt=y,x,x&chbh=a
&chs=360x240&cht=bvg&chco=CC0057CC,3D7930&chds=0,20
&chd=t1:10.059,12.578,13.6,11.135,11.018,7.104,6.92|50,60,100,40,20,40,30
This produces a graph like this:
You can then add labels (using chxl) and ranges (uses chxr) to your axes as you wish – and even add axis labels to the top and right hand graph edges, using the t and r axes, with as many of each as you’d like, and using their list position as a parameter to the range/label settings. I hope this is useful to someone, as it took me a little bit of research to figure it out.
OAuth Google API for Unregistered Applications
To make this work, when you sign your OAuth request Google will accept some default values for consumer key and secret – see their documentation on signing oauth requests. To do this, set both consumer key and secret to the value “anonymous”, and proceed as you normally would. The only difference so far as I can see is that the user will be shown a more cautious message when they are prompted to grant access to your application. Personally I think this is a great approach, particularly when prototyping ideas. Registering the applications though is simple and quick so I’d recommend registering for most applications once they get beyond concept stage.
Retrieving Data from Google Analytics API using PHP
Google Analytics Accounts API
Analytics Accounts
Your google account can have access to one or more analytics accounts. For example when I log in I have access to accounts which hold the data for lornajane.net, phpwomen.org, joind.in and a few other things I’m involved with. Only lornajane.net actually belongs to me, the others are accounts created by someone else and which I have access to. The first challenge therefore is to work out which a user has access to – the best place to start is the reference page for the Management API, part of google’s own documentation. In a nutshell, we build up a URL like this, being increasingly specific by fleshing out the values in square brackets on subsequent calls:
https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/datasources/ga/accounts/[accountID]/
webproperties/[webPropertyID]/profiles/[profileID]/goals
First up then, is to get a list of accounts for our authorized user – I already have a valid oauth access token to use in this example Continue reading
Fetching Namespaced XML Elements With SimpleXML
I was reading from their analytics data feed API, this returns a few key fields and then multiple <entry> tags, each with namespaced children. The entry tags look something like: Continue reading