Developer Jess

Today's post is going to serve as a bit of a journal, the pitfalls and triumphs I'm facing as I achieve a smooth user experience in the world of creating digital loyalty cards.  The main player I'm working with on this is with Airship (formally Urban Airship).  Their support has been fairly good, I personally had the most trouble in linking the template with Google Pay.  The best piece of advice I can give is, do not start creating the template until you have got the Merchant Centre all ready to go. This is all going rather well at the moment, including using the Adaptive Link APIs which provides a simple query string approach which will redirect the request to either the iOS or Android pass depending on their device.  Ultimately though I would like to eventually call the Google and Apple API's directly so this has been a side project. I'm starting with Google, and the main piece of documentation starts here . Straight away there is a missing, or at least mis...

After much research, I felt it was only fair to share the knowledge, and so picking up from one of my last posts where I demonstrated how to get data, now it's time to dive in to how to write data to Google Sheets.  The rest of the class can stay the same, we're just going to add one function. So what's happening here? The main thing to point out is that we want to pass an array of arrays for the values, representing the rows and columns.  If you are going to be wanting to do that in an API, might not be as simple without serializing and base64 encoding for good measure. Otherwise, it's fairly self-explanetory.  I'd be happy to try and answer any questions, but hope it inspires!

Carrying on from my last post , a while back, I blogged about how I took data from Campaign Monitor and posted to Google's Data Studio for the sake of creating a better, compiled dashboard.  Well the request popped up again for me, but this time to take some more generic data, so I decided to write a better class for it. This is going to be short and sweet, like the previous post, we're going to need a simple addition to our composer.json: The construct object is going to look very similar as well: And now we'll just make a simple upload function to use to store in Google's storage buckets: From there - you can go nuts in the Data Studio.  Folder and file naming conventions are very important, with spreadsheets for instance, you can keep uploading date stamped files which will merge nicely and you can see your increments over time. Hope you'll all be able to make some cool integrations with this! J.

On to a new topic today, we've all heard the buzz about "Big Data" and how we can tackle querying in lightning fast speeds, but what are some of the best ways of working with highly mutable but tiny data sets? I'll lead you in by example on this one - I had recently had a custom developed PIM (Product Information Management) system, but also part of this system, I also kept a database of our stores and their respective catalogue versions. For a while, it was good - until it wasn't. It didn't scale that effectively in the long term. The PIM should have only been just that, not a hybrid of extraneous bits and pieces of data. So I'm going to fast forward to the solution its now been moved to - I've created a workbook in Google Sheets and tied the integrations to this. This not only scales incredibly well, but you also have the luxury of cell-by-cell history out of the box. So, how to proceed? First you need to add the component using Composer : ...

It's a brave new world, where data is king. Sometimes, this data can live in platforms which does not let you use it as effectively as you should .  Today, I'm going to take you on a way that you can programmatically extract and transfer to a much richer set of analysis tools. The Task I was handed a project to move all of the data from Campaign Monitor to Google Data Studio .  No surprise, this reporting platform had a massive list of data connectors, and after a little bit of research, I decided to go with Google Cloud Storage - it just seemed to be the most flexible. The Extraction I wouldn't be able to go in to great detail on how I've made my Campaign Monitor class, being that its Intellectual Property, but I can go in to where you can find the relavant documentation.  I was asked to focus on just 3 streams of data; Opens , Clicks and Unsubscribes . Be sure to follow the Getting Started guide, using the most appropriate level of authentication.  Not...