JSON Data source

JSON Data source provides a quick and flexible way to issue queries to arbitrary RESTful endpoints that return JSON data.

Create the JSON Data source

1. Navigate to Integrations > Data Sources

2. Click New Data Source

3. Select JSON

4. Create the data source

   1. Enter a name for your data source (required)

   2. Enter Basic Authentication credentials (optional)

Writing queries

1. Navigate to Queries and click New Query

2. In the drop-down on your left hand side, select your new data source

Providing HTTP Options

The following HTTP options are used for sending a query

The URL parameter is the only required parameter

• url - This is the URL where the RESTful API is exposed

• method - the HTTP method to use (default: get)

• headers - a dictionary of headers to send with the request

• auth - basic auth username/password (should be passed as an array: [username, password])

• params - a dictionary of query string parameters to add to the URL

• data - a dictionary of values to use as the request body

• json - same as data except that it’s being converted to JSON

• path - accessing attributes within the response

  • field - rows of objects within selected attribute

Example query:

url: https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:0747532699
path: items
fields: ["volumeInfo.authors","volumeInfo.title","volumeInfo.publisher","accessInfo.webReaderLink"]

Example query including all HTTP options:

url: https://httpbin.org/post
method: post
headers: {"User-Agent": "Test", "Accept": "*/*"}
auth: [username, password]
params: {?q=myQuery}
json: {"this": "is", "my": {"json":"body"}}
path: json
fields: ["my.json"]

Filtering response data: path and fields

The response data can be filtered by specifying the path and fields parameters. The path filter allows accessing attributes within the response, for e.g. if a key foo in the response contains rows of objects you want to access, specifying path foo will convert each of the objects into rows.

In the example below, we are then selecting fields volumeInfo.authors, volumeInfo.title, volumeInfo.publisher and accessInfo.webReaderLink

url: https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:0747532699
path: items
fields: ["volumeInfo.authors","volumeInfo.title","volumeInfo.publisher","accessInfo.webReaderLink"]

The resulting data from the above query is a nicely formatted table that can be searched in Apica Ascent or made available as a widget in a dashboard