Leveraging Quickbase data within Power BI as your data visualization tool can be a powerful combination. There are a whole host of options to bring your Quickbase data into Power BI, with certain positives and negatives associated with each method. In this post, we will be covering the “API_DoQuery” method by utilizing Quickbases’s API within Power BI.
API_DoQuery allows us to query Quickbase and obtain records from specific tables. By utilizing this API call, you are able to bring Quickbase data into Power BI directly. This method is relatively simple and can get you utilizing Quickbase data in Power BI very quickly. Let’s see how we can go through the process of doing this:
1. Open Power BI Desktop and click the “Get Data” button in the top left-hand side of your screen. See the image below.
2. This dropdown provides the different methods that we currently have available for obtaining data from other sources. Go ahead and search and find the “Web” connector as shown below:
3. Now we need to utilize Quickbases’s “API_DoQuery URL Alternative“. We need to construct a URL to provide the “Web” connector in Power BI. Using the URL example below – fill in the red text items to match your specific Quickbase application.
https ://target_domain/db/target_dbid?a=API_DoQuery&usertoken=user_ token&apptoken=app_token&query=user_query&clist=field_clist
Where the above is equal to the following:
- target_domain = Users Quickbase domain for the application of interest.
- target_dbid = DBID of the table of interest in Quickbase.
- user_token = User token for the Quickbase application of interest (obtain from your Quickbase application).
- app_token = Application token if required for the Quickbase application (obtain from your Quickbase application).
- user_query = Provide a query to only return records of interest. This is optional. If you want, you can remove this entire query parameter in the URL (“&query=user_query” from above).
- field_clist =Field clist to limit what fields are returned from the Quickbase table (optional). This is a period deliminated list Ex: 23.32.12.3.
4. Add the above URL to the Web Connector and click “Ok”:
5. Click “Connect” on the following screen:
6. Click on “Edit” when you get to the screen shown below:
7. On the “record” column shown below, click the icon next to the column name, and then click “Ok” shown below.
8. Select the columns that you don’t need and right click and select “Remove Columns”
9. Click ‘File’ in the top left corner and select “Close and Apply” as shown below:
10. The Quickbase fields/records are now visible and can be used at the right-hand side of the screen. Note, you can right-click on these items and rename them if needed – or use the Query Editor to rename them as shown in the second image below.
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