(written for the Power BI blog but sharing here early)
As part of the community it is only natural you will want to know what is going on around you. Meetup
makes creating and tracking your local events a breeze and their REST APIs enables creating reports on those meetings. Unfortunately traditionally REST APIs required complex programing due to threading and paging with many “simple” samples requiring hundereds of lines of C#.
What most people don’t know is calling REST end points and parsing the resultant JSON is really easy in Power BI.
This walk through will show you how to call and report on your club and user group activities using the Meetup REST API.
Step 1. Join the Meet up API group. This is needed to get an access key.
http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/
Step 2. Get a Meetup API key.
This is needed to both access the APIs and identify who “you” are to Meetup. This can be done here: https://secure.meetup.com/meetup_api/key/
Step 3. Determine the API that gives you the data you want.
In some cases you may need to call a couple API’s and create joins across multiple JSON files to give you the data you want; for Meetup it is pretty straight forward it is called Calendar under events.
http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/self/calendar/#list with the actual call being: https://api.meetup.com/self/calendar?key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
Note i have replaced my Meetup API key with X so this won’t run until you substitute the “X”s with your key.
At this point you can execute the call directly in a browser….Just not very pretty or useful!
Now that we have access comes the fun part – putting into Power BI!
4. Choose Get Data from the start screen or the Home Tab.
5. Select the “Other” category and select Web
6. Paste/type in the REST call you want to make. In this case use the calendar API above: https://api.meetup.com/self/calendar?key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
-substituting the “X”s with your key.
Impactful Individual
