Good morning,
I am new and come from a data visualisation background. Is there any information I can read which will step me through connecting data visualisation products (Tableau, Power BI, QLIKsence) to Aristotle. I did have a quick search here and a wider google but couldn’t find anything.
Thank you
A
Hi Adrian,
Thanks for such an interesting question. I work for Aristotle Cloud Services Australia.
While we don’t (yet!) have a turnkey way of connecting the Aristotle Metadata Registry to the popular data visualisation products such as (Tableau, PowerBI, QLIKsense) to Aristotle, we fortunately do have a well-documented API for a wide range of Registry functionality (including all viewing and updating all metadata items).
Connecting data visualisation products is therefore then a question of how to connect the data visualisation product to our API.
Tableau
Tableau offers a software toolkit called Web Data Connector (WDC) that offers a way to connect Tableau to arbitrary APIs. Using the toolkit, you write a Web Data Connector, which is a HTML page with JavaScript code that connects to a REST API, converts the data to a JSON format, and passes the data to Tableau.
There’s a step by step tutorial here for writing a WDC here:
Documentation for v4 (the current version) of Aristotle’s API is located at /api/v4 in all our Registry deployments. For a public example of the documentation, check out https://aristotle.cloud/api/v4/.
PowerBI
With PowerBI, you can directly use a Rest API as a data source. From the Get Data dropdown, click through Other > Web, and replace it with the Aristotle API endpoint you’re interested in.
Here’s the Community Help I’m basing this answer off:
QLik
The Qlik REST Connector is a generic connector to a REST API that allows Qlik Sense and Qlik View to load data into Qlik apps from a JSON endpoint (data source).
For more detail on how to set it up, check out the link below:
Thanks for such an interesting question. If you want more any details, or to discuss data visualisation and Aristotle further, please feel free to reply!
Thank you for the response, time for some detailed reading now. 
@Adrian did you have any success getting it set up, this would be very interesting for our agency.
@GemmaM unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to test thoroughly all of these options. I was able to test PowerBI and whilst I could connect I couldn’t actually see any of the metadata. I suspect that is a result of our data not yet being publicly viewable. This will be a side project while we get our registry up and operational.
Adrian, you should be able to view metadata through the API, even if its not published, as long as you have set up an API token to authenticate with.
I’ve attached a link to the API training that covers what is need to do to set this up. https://aristotlemetadata.sharepoint.com/:p:/s/Training/EYEFzKVDFyhOtmhGx7ioqK0BGiR6OFkEdlVFRmPQQb_wjg?e=jlzdvp
The two necessary slides are also below:
Hope that helps!
Also, we’re planning on setting up a developer specific help site that covers the API and if you’ve got some suggestions on how we could handle this it’d be appreciated.
Sam, thank you for the extra tips. I have been able to download a json file from the api v4 page and have that interpreted by 2 data visualisation products (Tableau and Power BI).
Thats great to hear Adrian! If you can it’d be great if you could share some screenshots, I’m sure other would be interested to your progress!
One of the things I have noticed when making the api call from Power BI using the url https://dss.aristotlecloud.io/api/v4/metadata/dataelement?format=json&t=token is I get paginated results and only get the first 25 records. Power BI doesn’t get any further pages.
To get Tableau to play I have been downloading the json file generated by the same url, but again I am limited to the first page of data.
Is there a way I can get the whole result set using the url?
For rate-limiting and server load reasons, you can’t query to get the whole result set, but you can increase the page size and paginate through. This is done by setting the page and page_size queries. For example if you wanted the second 50 results you could do:
https://dss.aristotlecloud.io/api/v4/metadata/dataelement?format=json&t=token&page_size=50&page=2
More details are in the DataElement endpoint documentation, shown below.
