API Explorer ---> Excel Database

It would be nice if you could take the results from an API Explorer call and populate and Excel database.

We are working on a project with search capabilities. It would be great if instead of hitting an API every time, the data could get pulled down once per day and placed in a excel file. That way we could just filter the data based on entered text. It would make things a bit more snappy.

Hi Michael,

If I try to rephrase your need, it looks like you would like to have the same filtering / sorting capabilities IntuiFace currently has with Excel-based feeds on all the REST-based feeds, doing these actions on a “local cache” of the last retrieved data.
This is an already identified enhancement but I don’t have any release date to communicate about this one.

The other solution could be for you to directly import your data in an Excel file, using Excel capabilities.

Seb

Yes, that would do it. I’m looking forward to that enhancement.

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Is there a way to automate the “direct import of data into an Excel file”? I’m sure there is through writing an Excel script, I’m just not terribly fluent. Perhaps a resource I can reference?

Is there a way to rebuild the excel table from within intuiface by pulling data using API Explorer, parsing the content and writing to the Excel file?

If you are using a CMS system such as Airtable we have built a caching asset that downloads everything from the API explorer and converts that into an excel which Intuiface uses to display content like you normally would.

Kind Regards

Louie

Yes, in this particular product, we’re using Drupal 8 as the data source to provide the json file. If you have a caching asset that would take that json and build an excel table, that would be great! How does your plugin handle images and videos?

So basically you would put your requests into the plugin and in our case, it would download all the Airtable bases and convert those requests into a local file which is stored on the local machine, this will then be shown in Intuiface in an excel file.

We will have to see if we can alter this for Drupal.

Kind Regards

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Hi Louie,

We’d be interested in this as well. I’ve played with creating a scroll asset that “parses” through the airtable results then re-writes the data line by line to a local excel file but my experience is its pretty clunky and not good if you have a lot of data to write.

I’d be interested in seeing your solution as well, is it knack compaitible?

Hi Ben,

Unfortunately, it’s currently only Airtable only but we could see if we can alter this for Knack, if you are interested drop me a PM.

My man @AlexB might be able to help you short term with Knack?

Kind Regards

Thanks for bringing me in, @Promultis!

Hey @ben1,
From what I’ve learned, there’s at least 4 or 5 ways to sync cloud data to local storage…and each have their own merits and drawbacks:

  1. Use @Promultis’s service to sync airtable into Excel.

  2. Pay a custom programmer to build a caching program for Knack. I’ve briefly looked into this, and it’s probably the most expensive of all the options.

  3. Wait for Intuiface’s CMS to be released this year, which is supposed to have local caching built in.

  4. Use triggers/actions to write record-by-record into excel, which you’ve already outlined before.

  5. Lastly, I was also able to do this somewhat smoothly using a program called Appsheet, which writes records into a cloud-Excel file, which then sync’s with OneDrive into the local PC, and then use a sync program like Mirror Folder to make real-time updates to your Excel file in your local experience. It works pretty well and is very fast…however it takes a LOT of setup, and Appsheet is quite complicated when you get into the data formulas.

This is a very common need for Intuiface designers, so I think we’ll see more options (especially with Intuiface’s own CMS caching) within the next year or so. Hope this helps!

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And I should mention, if you have any questions about building with Knack, I’m happy to help.

Thanks @Promultis much appreciated , I’m keen to look at your solution for our other builds so I’ll send you a PM, we only just moved over to knack from airtable for a new build (thank you @AlexB for your presentation… we love knack!)

Sounds like the IF CMS is going to solve some of these issues shortly.

Thanks again guys.

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Thanks @AlexB for this very complete and accurate summary of current options!
I’ll just say that for option 3, Intuiface headless CMS will have local caching built in, it’s not a supposition anymore :wink:

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Thanks everybody for all the options. The Intuiface CMS with local caching will be huge! Do you know if it will have the same functionality as the Excel Interface Asset?

Trust me I have been asking for local caching for years! But they finally made me relax back in 2019 with caching on the agenda! :partying_face:

With our Local Caching asset you can use Intuiface as normal but all the assets are downloaded from “Airtable” and stored locally. This translates into an Excel file that is updated whenever you want to pull an update!

Regarding the question you asked: @Seb might be able to shed some light if you ask him nicely :wink:

Awesome Louie, With the project we have coming down the pike, we’ll be writing our own CMS in Laravel. The plan is to setup a script that downloads any changes to the CMS, database and assets to each player which will be running a local server. So, whenever intuiface makes an API request, it’ll use local endpoints. I still need to scope it out a bit more, but that’s the general idea.

Hi Chuck @programmers,

When you ask " Do you know if it will have the same functionality as the Excel Interface Asset? ", I’ll suppose you’re talking about filtering. The headless CMS will have some similar features, using the concept of variants we presented in our last user conference in October '20 & Leadership Summit in February '21. It will not have any formula mechanism like Excel has.