Look up a data table via HTTP

Help
1

I would like to look up a data table on a third party web site that has the table stored in either JSON, csv or XML format.

Would you suggest to look the values up in real time or perhaps ‘sync’ it as a Losant Data Table, say once a day? It’s not important that it be up-to-date to the minute as the data table on the external website are in fact updated only daily which is more than enough. However, the look ups on the “day old” data will be quite frequent as device state is saved within my workflows.

The table is about 1800 rows and 9 rows of text. The JSON version of the table is about 250kb.

Any suggestions?

2

Hi @paul_wareham,

If this were my project and I was accessing this data more than one time a day, I would likely do a once-a-day Losant Data Table upload. Using Data Tables usually makes it easier to access and manipulate data, and can also make workflows run much faster as the data is easily queried. Data tables make me a bit more comfortable when working with data (and large amounts of it) as it reduces the number of steps needed to access the data, so there are, comparatively, less errors and issues as well.

Let me know what you think! :smile:
Julia

3

i agree. We will be looking up rows in that table hundreds of times to per day potentially.

Can you advise the most direct route to do a once/day Data Table upload in an automated fashion?

4

Hi @paul_wareham,

I would probably do a Timer Node that fires once a day, followed by an HTTP Node with a GET request to retrieve the data. Then finally a Table: Insert Rows Node to upload the data to your data table.

Thanks!
Julia