I have an web (PHP) application that collects some internal usage statistics (like memory usage, transfer speed, compression ratio/speed, etc).
By using the collected data I want to create a report (a chart, a bar graph, etc) that shows this data.
Usually we have (at least) two options:
write the report with the aid of some PHP reporting engine
use an external web service where (i) I can define a report specification up-front and (ii) feed the web service with the data collected from user and retrieve (an object/image) the report representation of that data.
I'm wondering if I can use the Google Reporting API as in the case 2) above.
Everything I read about Google Reporting API looks like the Reporting API is used in connection with data collected by Google (or pushed to Google), i.e. Google Analytics.
Google has a powerful reporting engine. If I could use it somehow to create custom reports using custom data it will be a big help for my project.
#Edit: may Google Charts be the answer? I will read their specification and I'll come later with my own answer.
The question was wrong: I didn't meant "report" but "chart". So instead looking toward Google Reporting I should look toward Google Chart. Thus the answer seems now trivial: Google Chart.
Google Chart is rather a client library (eg. JavaScript) than a server library (eg. PHP).
You can plot a chart in less than 5 minutes. All you need is to link the Google's API .js file in your .html source code, create a DataTable (where you should specify the columns and their respective data), set some options for your chart (like the title, the type, the parent DIV element that will encapsulate the final child chart object). Last but not least you have to call the draw method that will plot the chart. That's all folks!
Related
I am trying to import data from the following website to Google Sheets. I want to import all the matches for the day.
https://www.tournamentsoftware.com/tournament/b731fdcd-a0c8-4558-9344-2a14c267ee8b/Matches
I have tried importxml and importhtml, but it seems this does not work as the website uses JavaScript. I have also tried to use Apipheny without any success.
When using Apipheny, the error message is
'Failed to fetch data - please verify your API Request: {DNS error'
Tl;Dr
Adapted from my answer to How to know if Google Sheets IMPORTDATA, IMPORTFEED, IMPORTHTML or IMPORTXML functions are able to get data from a resource hosted on a website? (also posted by me)
Please spend some time learning how to use the browsers developers tools so you will be able to identify
if the data is already included in source code of the webpage as JSON / literal JavaScript object or in another form
if the webpage is doing a GET or POST requests to retrieve the data and when those requests are done (i.e. as some point of the page parsing, or on event)
if the requests require data from cookies
Brief guide about how to use the web browser to find useful details about the webpage / data to import
Open the source code and look if the required data is included. Sometimes the data is included as JSON and added to the DOM using JavaScript. In this case it might be possible to retrieve the data by using the Google Sheets functions or URL Fetch Service from Google Apps Script.
Let say that you use Chrome. Open the Dev Tools, then look at the Elements tab. There you will see the DOM. It might be helpful to identify if the data that you want to import besides being on visible elements is included in hidden / not visible elements like <script> tags.
Look at Source, there you might be able to see the JavaScript code. It might include the data that you want to import as JavaScript object (commonly referred as JSON).
There are a lot of questions about google-sheets +web-scraping that mentions problems using importhtml and/or importxml that already have answers and even many include code (JavaScript snippets, Google Apps Script functions, etc.) that might save you to have to use an specialized web-scraping tool that has a more stepped learning curve. At the bottom of this answer there is a list of questions about using Google Sheets built-in functions, including annotations of the workaround proposed.
On Is there a way to get a single response from a text/event-stream without using event listeners? ask about using EventSource. While this can't be used on server side code, the answer show how to use the HtmlService to use it on client-side code and retrieve the result to Google Sheets.
As you already realized, the Google Sheets built-in functions importhtml(), importxml(), importdata() and importfeed() only work with static pages that do not require signing in or other forms of authentication.
When the content of a public page is created dynamically by using JavaScript, it cannot be accessed with those functions, by the other hand the website's webmaster may also purposefully have prevented web scraping.
How to identify if content is added dynamically
To check if the content is added dynamically, using Chrome,
Open the URL of the source data.
Press F12 to open Chrome Developer Tools
Press Control+Shift+P to open the Command Menu.
Start typing javascript, select Disable JavaScript, and then press Enter to run the command. JavaScript is now disabled.
JavaScript will remain disabled in this tab so long as you have DevTools open.
Reload the page to see if the content that you want to import is shown, if it's shown it could be imported by using Google Sheets built-in functions, otherwise it's not possible but might be possible by using other means for doing web scraping.
According to Wikipedia,
Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.
Use of robots.txt to block Web crawlers
The webmasters could use robots.txt file to block access to website. In such case the result will be #N/A Could not fetch URL.
Use of User agent
The webpage could be designed to return a special a custom message instead of the data.
Below there are more details about how Google Sheets built-in "web-scraping" functions works
IMPORTDATA, IMPORTFEED, IMPORTHTML and IMPORTXML are able to get content from resources hosted on websites that are:
Publicly available. This means that the resource doesn't require authorization / to be logged in into any service to access it.
The content is "static". This mean that if you open the resource using the view source code option of modern web browsers it will be displayed as plain text.
NOTE: The Chrome's Inspect tool shows the parsed DOM; in other works the actual structure/content of the web page which could be dynamically modified by JavaScript code or browser extensions/plugins.
The content has the appropriated structure.
IMPORTDATA works with structured content as csv or tsv doesn't matter of the file extension of the resource.
IMPORTFEED works with marked up content as ATOM/RSS
IMPORTHTML works with marked up content as HTML that includes properly markedup list or tables.
IMPORTXML works with marked up content as XML or any of its variants like XHTML.
The content doesn't exceeds the maximum size. Google haven't disclosed this limit but the below error will be shown when the content exceeds the maximum size:
Resource at url contents exceeded maximum size.
Google servers are not blocked by means of robots.txt or the user agent.
On W3C Markup Validator there are several tools to checkout is the resources had been properly marked up.
Regarding CSV check out Are there known services to validate CSV files
It's worth to note that the spreadsheet
should have enough room for the imported content; Google Sheets has a 10 million cell limit by spreadsheet, according to this post a columns limit of 18278, and a 50 thousand characters as cell content even as a value or formula.
it doesn't handle well large in-cell content; the "limit" depends on the user screen size and resolution as now it's possible to zoom in/out.
References
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/javascript/disable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
Related
Using Google Apps Script to scrape Dynamic Web Pages
Scraping data from website using vba
Block Website Scraping by Google Docs
Is there a way to get a single response from a text/event-stream without using event listeners?
Software Recommendations
Web scraping tool/software available for free?
Recommendations for web scraping tools that require minimal installation
Web Applications
The following question is about a different result, #N/A Could not fetch URL
Inability to use IMPORTHTML in Google sheets
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Google Sheet Web-scraping ImportXml Xpath on Yahoo Finance doesn't works with french stock
One of the answers includes Google Apps Script code to get data from a JSON source. As of January 4th 2023, it's not longer working, very likely because Yahoo! Finance is now encrying the JSON. See the Tainake's answer to How to pull Yahoo Finance Historical Price Data from its Object with Google Apps Script? for script using Crypto.js to handle this.
How to fetch data which is loaded by the ajax (asynchronous) method after the web page has already been loaded using apps script?
One answer suggest to read the data from the server instead of scraping from a webpage.
Using ImportXML to pull data
Extracting data from web page using Cheerio Library
One answer suggest the use of an API and Google Apps Script
ImportXML is good for basic tasks, but it won't get you too far if you are serious in scraping:
The approach only works with the most basic websites (no SPAs rendered in browsers can be scraped this way. Any basic web scraping protection or connectivity issue breaks the process, and there isn't any control over HTTP request geo location, or number of retries) - and Yahoo Finance is not a simple website
If the target website data requires some cleanup post-processing, it's getting very complicated since you are now "programming with Excel formulas", rather a painful process compared to regular code writing in conventional programming languages
There isn't any proper launch and cache control, so the function can be triggered occasionally and if the HTTP request fails, cells will be populated with ERR! values
I recommend using proper tools (automation framework and scraping engine which can render JavaScript-powered websites) and use Google Sheets just for basic storage purposes:
https://youtu.be/uBC752CWTew (Pipedream for automation and ScrapeNinja engine for scraping)
In google analytics I can add additional dimension which is named: Direct Sessions which gives two values : yes and no. The problem is that when im making reports in google studio i dont have this kind of dimension.
Maybe there is possible to add this dimension manually?
T.
If you have created a custom dimension in GA it is available in Google Data Studio (I assume that is what you mean by "Google Studio").
Currently the Google Analytics connector only provides access to data
available in custom reports. It does not provide access to
multi-channel funnels or real-time data. However, custom dimensions
and metrics are available in Data Studio.
You can select it like any other dimension (use the search feature and look for the name you gave to your dimension in the GA property settings).
Source
I have datum in a CSV file, that I would like to be graphed by the use of Google Charts. I've done some research, and concluded the best way of doing it would be:
Upload the CSV file online from the server to Quandl
Download contents of the CSV file in to a HTML template
This will all be done with a Crontab, so the graphs will be updated in intervals - ie automatically.
Q1: Is there any other known alternatives of converting contents of a CSV file to a Google Charts
Q2: Can this be done with BASH? Or is there a more appropriate/easier languages for such a project [ie Python, JS?].
This generated graph will be embedded into a website, and thus be online.
From Google Chart docs:
The most common way to use Google Charts is with simple JavaScript
that you embed in your web page. You load some Google Chart libraries,
list the data to be charted, select options to customize your chart,
and finally create a chart object with an id that you choose. Then,
later in the web page, you create a with that id to display the
Google Chart.
Then, the most common language is javascript, why are you trying something different?
I am working on a business application that will do financial computations based upon publicly traded companies' financial statements. Specifically, I would like to use data from pages such as this. Such as the number for the operating income in the first column.
My current plan is to parse the page as an htm file(if I can get it). however this is my first time attempting to write an application that interacts with the web, so I am uncertain if this is the best way to proceed. I am currently expecting to implement this library. to do the parsing.
Once I have all the relevant numbers, and have done the calculations, I would like to place the results into an Excel spreadsheet. This is also something I do not know how to do.
Any advice or responses detailing how to implement this plan or how to form a better one are greatly appreciated.
For financial data regarding publicly traded companies, you probably want to use a web service, rather than parsing HTML. This is one example of such a webservice (though I'm not vouching for its price or reliability - I've never used it). You could create a simple console app in Visual Studio (a VSTO solution is probably better, I just don't have much experience with it) that retrieves data via the web service, and then pastes and formats it in Excel via Excel Interop. There's many posts about Excel Interop here on SO, as well as all over the web.
What you're trying to do sounds so common that I wonder if there's an existing report suite available somewhere.
I need to understand a good way to design a web page with dynamically updated graphs. It should be something close to what stock market graphs look like (e.g. Google Finance), although with a bit more complicated functionality, which is not the point. Naturally I am thinking of writing an ajaxy-style flash control, which would communicate with the server through, okay, something like XMLHttpRequest, but from within flash code, and draw things basing on data received. Is this doable with flash? Does security model allow such kind of client-server interaction? If yes, could you think of any references for me to get started (similar opensource projects, articles, whatever)? Or should I forget about flash and use a Java applet right away?
An important thing to note: I don't think I can use Google charting API, because I need also to have user interaction. In the link above to Google Finance the user can drag the graph to and forth with the mouse, that's close to what I need (I will also need to implement some actions from the dropdown menu).
Thanks for your answers and opinions!
Try this: JQuery Flot
Flot is a JQuery plugin to plot graphs. You keep replotting in-place with the latest data at the desired frequency to generate a dynamically updated graph. It is based on the <canvas> tag. We use it successfully to generate pretty complex dynamically updated graphs in our applications. The updates are fetched via periodic AJAX calls.
Another alternative is YUI Charts
We did not explore this a lot but this uses Flash and AJAX like you wanted to do.
/RS
I have used the Google Charts API to do this sort of thing. For a simple example, see my Sunrise and Sunset page. This page calculates sunrise and sunset times for a given latitude and longitude, all in Javascript, then uses the Google Chart API to replace the graph on the page with the requested data.
Update: The Stack Overflow reputation graph (see your user page) isn't Flash and yet allows interactive dragging. (Click and drag on the left to update the posts on the right that reflect the highlighted reputation region.) Perhaps you could look at how that is implemented.
You have described Flex...
This is very possible in flash.
You can use the URLLoader class to obtain data from a server at run time and the draw your graph using a custom control. In actionscript3 you'd subclass the Shape class and write a little drawing code to draw your graphs. Flash has support for drawing and filling so it would probably be very good at this.
The flash client can poll the server for updates. Or if you want a "live" connection you can establish a socket connection to the server and let the server push updated data live. Flash is good for this as you can push XML data over the socket and use the built in support for processing the XML, or you can send binary data just as easily.
As for the security model it's just the standard flash one. You can make network connections back to the server that the swf file came from with no issues. If you want to make a connection to a different server then that server needs to give your client permission to connect to it by hosting a crossdomain.xml file
I'm not sure about the Flash side of things, but this would be pretty simple to do in Silverlight. I am pretty sure you'd easily be able to make a server request in Flash too.
I'd do some searching for long polling.