Google Data Studio Connector

Owned by kushagra mehra (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Nov 25, 2020
2 min read

Data Studio Community Connectors enable direct connections from Data Studio to any internet accessible data source. You can connect to commercial platforms, public datasets, or your own on-premise private data. Community Connectors can fetch data through Web APIs, JDBC APIs, flat files (CSV, JSON, XML), and Apps Script Services.

Let's assume you have published a package on npm and you want to track the download count of the package over time by day. In this codelab, you will build a Community Connector that fetches this data from the npm package download counts API. Then you can use that Community Connector in Data Studio to build a dashboard visualizing this data.

In a basic Community Connector, you'll define four functions:

  • getAuthType()

  • getConfig()

  • getSchema()

  • getData()

Depending on the current step of the workflow, Data Studio executes these connector functions and uses the response in the subsequent steps. The video below gives an overview of:

  • How a Community Connector works

  • Different steps in the workflow

  • When different functions are called

  • When Data Studio shows different user interfaces

  • Expected user actions at different steps

 

Nov 26, 2020

I have managed to create a connector that can invoke an Jira api e.g. https://example.atlassian.net/rest/agile/latest/board/1. The authentication utilised for this purpose is the use of a Key as a Basic token.

When the user starts the connector, they will need to provide a key in this instance. The key needs to be in the format of user_email:token and then base64 encoded.

Currently in the code, i have supplied the base64 key.

The result of this specific query will look something like this:

{
"maxResults": 50,
"startAt": 0,
"total": 1,
"isLast": true,
"values": [
{
"id": 1,
"self": "https://kodevelop.atlassian.net/rest/agile/1.0/board/1",
"name": "GDS board",
"type": "simple",
"location": {
"projectId": 10000,
"displayName": "GDS (GDS)",
"projectName": "GDS",
"projectKey": "GDS",
"projectTypeKey": "software",
"avatarURI": "/secure/projectavatar?size=small&s=small&pid=10000&avatarId=10412",
"name": "GDS (GDS)"
}
}
]
}

Then the response will be parsed and you can pretty much get any data from this and many other apis on the platform.

The next steps are:

  1. Check if there is a function that appscript can support to create a base64 encoded key otherwise will probably have to call an api to do that. I am not sure how secure will that be.

  2. To use oAuth instead of key auth type.