Downloads, APIs, and Web Services

Working with data doesn’t only include handling in-house or cloud data sources. In today’s world, the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) is becoming almost a necessity.

A lot of data lies in the cloud only accessible via API calls, and some of that data may be useful to us to enrich our local data sources or to acquire additional details about what is being analyzed, and sometimes even for fun.

Alteryx has a very powerful tool to access APIs—the Download tool, which allows us to connect to any URI, including an API, a web service (a type of API), and so on.

This chapter covers the following recipes:

• Managing APIs’ Extensible Markup Language (XML) responses
• Parsing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
• Getting paged results from APIs (Iterative Macros)

But before starting to consume them, let’s review some basic terminology involving APIs, as follows:

• API: A software...