API Issues/Suggestions // From NewSpring 😄

[delianides]

Here are a few questions/issues/concerns with the API

• The inability to perform calculations. It would be significantly more useful to query the API for the total attendance for a given date range (with optional campus).
• Allow categories (id or slug) to return the data for each campuses.

\:category\:campus (or ?campus_id (or slug) = xxx)
#The campus is optional otherwise it returns all campuses. 

• Using the /records endpoint requires that the JSON response be stored locally and then parsed or the JSON has to be parsed (slow), cached and displayed.
• The weekly_totals would be useful but having the exact total would be more important as apposed to a more readable response ("9.0K"). We are more concerned with the exact number rather than readability.

[jmccartie]

Thanks for the feedback @delianides! We're taking a look at adding some of these features!

[BryanKetron]

Hey @delianides we are planning on making some improvements to our Church Metrics API. I was wondering if you were still using it and if there was anything that we could do to make it better for you.

[delianides]

Sorry for the delay here, things have been kinda crazy lately.

The base for all queries to your api seem to be either by weeks or events through the records endpoint. Inside those queries its possible to pull all the metrics that we want. But doing queries this way makes getting totals over a specific period of time really time consuming. Abstraction would suggest that having endpoints for each of the metrics (/api/v2/salvations, /api/v2/baptism, etc) with optional filter parameters would make single api requests possible. You could request all salvations for a given week, over a specific time frame, or all salvations over a specific time for a given service. Right now, we have to pull in all the records that we haven't accounted for in our app by checking timestamps.

@jbaxleyiii wrote most of our API integration and I think he would have some good insight too.

[mattdeigh]

@delianides We've got some major dashboard improvements coming down the pipe on our side. I think I can get a lot of the reporting stuff your asking for in it. We're also looking into ways we can incorporate church metrics in other reporting services. It might look more like a querying interface instead of a manual pull of records.

[delianides]

Are you talking about a query interface within the API? That would be incredibly useful! Otherwise, while dashboard improvements would certainly help ministries, we're not using the API to replace anything the dashboard does now.

[mattdeigh]

@delianides I'm talking about one in the API. I'm not sure what the final product will look like, but the dashboard will query some kind of API. When we get to redoing the dashboard, we'll look at moving the queries to the public api. One of the visions recently has been to allow more integration with dashboard systems like Geckoboard.