Seconded, this was a customer request recently (hi Jamie!). Specifically, the ability to build dashboards that use data similar to the "Account Dashboard" view in A9 through REST calls in Excel. Trending and Excel formats are disabled in Generator.
We're working on providing more of the A9 type functionality...stay tuned for more info on that (good stuff brewing!). As for working in Excel, you should be able to use the XML format to get the non-reporting information available through those other methods, and use it in Excel. Is that not working as expected for you?
Good to hear! According to the customer, Excel doesn't like XML as much as HTML... for others trying to do this today, manually changing the "format" parameter from XML to HTML and adding the suppress error messages parameter works fine... so just generate using XML, and change it when you add it as a data source in Excel.
More good news: if a user creates a REST request in the Generator.webtrends.com it is now defaulting to format=html and appends the suppress error codes param automatically.
So this should only be an issue if you are manually creating your address and didn't know about html. I suspect most Excel business users will be using the Generator to create their URLs.
Thanks Paul, that actually was the problem... in Generator everything works fine with "Get Report Data" but when they go to "Get Profile Overview Data" the Excel option is greyed out (along with trending), thus the "hack" of manually adding the parameters is needed. Sounds like there is more coming around this though, so I'll hold tight!
Thank you for providing these details. I think my users will be most comfortable using the format=html version.
The html output doesn't include the profile name or id as with the xml/xml2. When working with multiple profiles it would be useful to have this included.
I just tried the format=xml2 in excel for listProfiles method. Much better. xml2 format returns the data back in excel in a nice column format. Try the format=xml2 for methods where format=html is not available....data is returned in a much better excel consumable format.
