The first day of Dashboard Week kicked off with an API challenge. We were all required to connect to the Domain API, which gave us data for property listings and agents.
I decided my Dashboard should focus on giving the user a way to explore many properties at once (that all satisfy the entered criteria). I have enjoyed using the Domain mobile app in the past, it is great at showing you lots of stuff about one property at a time, but is limited at showing multiple. I was hoping to make my dashboard into a functional exploratory solution to this limitation.
Here’s a screenshot of my dashboard, you can click on it to go straight to Tableau Public and Have a look!
So far, my Dashboard only shows listings from Southern Sydney (my area) and only has Apartments or Town Houses as the available property types. I intend to expand the scope of my dashboard to Sydney wide at a later date.
One tricky that my dashboard does is a rolling photo view. This view is a web-page object, I noticed that each property has multiple photos, so I made another field that too the values of one of these URL fields depending on a parameter value. I realized that making a web-page action and then changing the parameter did not change the web-page on screen, as no further web-page action had been taken.
My solution to this limitation was to make a web-page action and a parameter action triggered by the same event (clicking on a property mark on the map), which simultaneously triggers a change in the parameter and a new web URL action. I’m not entirely sure whether it changes the URL in my field first (parameter action) and then loads the URL, or vice versa. I do know that now if you click repeatably on any mark on the map, it will update the picture on the bottom right!
I found it really challenging to find a solution for the web-page object sizing, the sizing that you get on Desktop is not the same as on Public, so I’ve spent a bit of time trying to edit the height and width in the URLs so it appears nicely on my Public Dashboard. I found the solution in a section of the Domain API Documentation. At the end of each URL, you could specify your desired size “/WWWxHHH”, and system will return the image with the closest size.
For example
https://bucket-api.domain.com.au/v1/bucket/image/w2000-h1333-2013168636_3_pi_161031_014943/800×600
For the data prep side of things, I really enjoyed this challenge, It was great to get more practice using APIs and making macros!
