What are Api's?
An API is a way to externally access a database in a controlled way, Someone who owns the database may not what you to have full access to the database, so you may get an API to get the information you need but not all of it.
How to get it in Alteryx?
The first thing we need is a Text input file, The text input file must contain the endpoint for the API. In this example i will be using the Police Crimes free API.
To connect to the API in Alteryx we need to use the Download tool which is under the Developer Tab
In the configuration pane of the developer tab we will direct the download to that endpoint.
What if I wanted to filter this down to more granular data.
We will need to use the Formula tool to change my Endpoint
In this case I wanted to see the crime data for the entire of 2023 in a specific location.
Finally, With The JSON Parse tool we can take the Download Data we got from the API and convert it into rows of Data
This is what the data looks like after the JSON Parse, so we will now text to columns and cross tab these to get columns with 1 row representing a crime