Today we were giving the assignment to go to cheese.com and webscrape the data. Furthermore, we were to find category that we wanted to take the cheese data from. Just like the prior 2 days we were given one day to complete the project, create a sketch and dashboard by 3:30pm then present. After looking at the categories, the milk of different cheeses is what I chose. No real reason behind my decision. Just wanted to start scraping. Before I started bringing in the data to alteryx, a quick refresher on regex tools and scraping was needed since quite some time has passed since we covered that topic. Spent around a half hour brushing up and making sure I felt comfortable to start. Definitely got stumped up in the beginning, started to pull null data, so I went back through the regex tool to figure out what I was doing wrong. Getting these errors definitely helps to learn. I realized after pulling the data in that there were multiple pages of cheeses and immediately knew that would require a batch macro. This I have done in the past, but not for multiple pages just multiple inputs. I tried to work out in my head how to do this. Figured that the page number would have to be updated every time that it went through the batch and that it would have to stop after the flow got to the last page. Took some time to research and find any good articles on this or a convo post, but came up with nothing. After trying out a couple of approaches I realized that I was spending too much time on this. Decided to go back to the website and pull as much data from one page as possible, which was 100 rows. For half the milks that was enough to get all the cheeses, others it wasn't. I figured I could go back to trying to get the batch work after I completed the project and wrote this blog. After this I completed building the workflow and documentation:
I moved on to creating a sketch for my dashboard, which would be simple and allow the user to search for a cheese by a milk and then the image of that cheese would generate on the dashboard. This is what I came up with:
Lastly I just had to build the dashboard. Unlike the past 2 days this did not take me very long due to the simplicity of the dashboard. This is the final product:
This project I scoped well for including find the right time to pause my attempt to get the batch macro to work and finish the project. This time I made sure to really understand the assignment. I definitely feel the need to brush up on batch macros when I am on bench. The stress was at a more manageable level today, which helped with the clarity and scope of this project. Looking forward to tomorrow and wrapping up dashboard and training! Followed by a graduation party!!