Developer Network : Thread List - Data Extraction

Does accessing the API from Flash/AIR need crossdomain.xml on server?

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:58:08 GMT

Hi,

I just had a discussion with a developer who currently works on a flash application which uses the API to pull data in.

It works fine in the developer verions, but does not get any data in a normal player. Due to the developer this is caused by the missing crossdomain.xml on the ws.webtrends.com server. Does anyone have the same experience and ideally a solution?

@Webtrends: Can you please verify that and place a crossdomain.xml on your server?

Excel/VB App Question

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:37:41 GMT

Eric - I am using your Excel/VB tool (thanks for putting it together - save a ton of time). Is there any way to place the results from multiple queries into the same worksheet? I have to pull monthly data from 20+ profiles into a dashboard and would rather not have a separate worksheet for each profile and month....

Yahoo! Widget Example

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:47:11 GMT

Here's an example of using some of our new web services and new designs in a Yahoo! Widget. This is only beta, and with limited functionality, but it should work for you (after you change the preferences to point to one of your profiles). Have fun. Make it better and post updates!

List of Availalbe Reports Has Changed

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:04:49 GMT

From yesterday to today (9/29/09) the list of available reports has changed and many are no longer available. Are there known issues that have occured in the last day that would cause this?

Building/Testing Against REST Web Services

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:02:55 GMT

When building & testing web services (DX REST) I have generally just hit the web services and pulled down the report, profile list, report list, or whatever other data I needed. However there is a problem with doing this, continuously pulling the report data down uses up usage unnecessarily & is also somewhat slow for debugging & troubleshooting.

What I'd like to be able to do is to either save, cache, or otherwise maintain a local repository of DimensionalReport Objects that I've previously retrieved form the web services. I have tried to serialize the returned objects but errors occur.

Does anyone have any other ideas, insight, or thoughts on how to setup an environment that wouldn't require continuously hitting the web services?

ODBC Access to WebTrends

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:43:21 GMT

Hi everybody,

I'm searching for documents and howtos how I can access data from WebTrends. As i focus the software solution, the only way is via ODBC in the moment?

Do you have any documents, hints, ideas?

TIA,

Michael

Auto refresh DX data in Excel step by step

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:37:44 GMT

One of the great things about the Webtrends REST web services is that there is NO PLUGIN required. No code, no add-ins, the connections are live.

All you need is a login to Webtrends and the workbook will work for you.

One of the really important use cases for this is when you are creating dashboards... but you don't want to have to manually updated a dashboard every month (week? day?) you just want to send your reports to other users and let them see the current data regardless. With some web services for other products out there, if you email reports around and want live data for all your recipients, you need to install an Excel plugin on every recipients machine which may work for you... but we've found that is not feasible for many (most?) of you. This was an important consideration in our web services design. There is a place for plugins (like designing initial dashboards for example) but the output needs to be easy to share, email, etc.

The funny thing is that we made it so easy to email reports to other users that we've had the request from several people on how you can make it so that the data will auto-refresh when the workbook is opened so that a REST request for "current_month" is always the current month.

Enabling auto-refresh on the REST data is really easy in Excel:

Step 1: Open a workbook that has Webtrends REST data in it. Click anywhere in the Webtrends data.

Step 2: Click on the "Data" > Connection "Properties" option.

Step 3: This dialogue comes up (screen shot). Note that this data is only available with authentication so you can't just have it refresh the data in the background without a login. So I recommend using the "Refresh data when opening the file" option.

That's it. Now anytime you open your Webtrends workbooks, it will automatically ask for your login to access the REST data and it will refresh.

REST API - Filtering dimension data

christian.ericsson@webtrends.com — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:58:58 GMT

I have recently found out that there may be a critical limitation in filtering dimension data when using the REST API.

Accouring to the documentation(and the generator) we can use the parameter search=<dimension value>. I have been told that search=<dimension value> * =<dimension value> * =<dimension value> may work or is supposed to work. Me and a few other have tried this with no success. Maybe this has worked in the past? Being able to filter on dimension data is an important feature that I hope webtrends REST API will support.

I have a customer example for this. (They are currently beta testing the REST API)

This customer uses webtrends data as a sales tool.
Their site is a portal for educations and they use for example this report to see what organizations has visited the pages for the different educations.
The school then has to pay for the amount of traffic this portal has generated… They internal sales people are doing extract for specific educations when talking to these customers on the phone. This report is massive and they need to limit the extract to the few ID's they are interested for that specific sales call.

Example:

https://ws.webtrends.com/beta/ReportService.svc/profiles/<profileid>/reports/<reportid>/?period=current_day-1&format=html

Part of result:

The need to do a request that looks something like this.

Example:

https://ws.webtrends.com/beta/ReportService.svc/profiles/<profileid>/reports/<reportid>/?period=current_day-1&search=17568*23242*84141&format=html

Result:

Is there a feature request for this or does anyone have any other useful information regarding this?

missing reports and how to get daily reports for a specific time period

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:50:49 GMT

Question 1. generator does not have options for me to select some reports, such as Scenario Analysis and Onsite Advertising. How can I get these reports?

Question 2. I tried period = time span * trend ength (as described in theAPI) but I always get an error message. How can I get daily reports for a specific time period? Why am I getting an error?

Single Level Paths Forward (and Reverse, while we're at it)

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:09:24 GMT

So I totally understand why we are not yet able to get Path Analysis and scenarios, but can we or are there plans to include the Single-Level Paths Forward/Reverse in the new UI and the REST API? Big fan of this report and it seems like a bummer to have to use the ODBC to get the data. I can live without trend data too

FTP excel reports or use DX API

webtrends@webtrends-dev.sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:07:23 GMT

Hi,

m a new baby on the board without any background of Webtrend.

In my project, there is a requirement to build a Mgmt Dashboard on the data extracted(weekly) from Webtrend reports(around 20) for all the profiles. Also the report data need to be persisted at our end. After I spent 2-3 hours on Webstrend documentation, I can think about 2 options to pull the data from Webtrends -

Schedule batch processes at out end which pulls data from Webtrend using REST API, transform and dump it into application DB. Then show it to end user one web based interface.
Schedule the Webtrend batches to FTP the csv reports to our site, extract the data, transform it and dump it into our DB.

Any suggestions?