On July the 22th at 9PM CET I will give the second part of the “Introduction to SSIS” webinar series on the MSSQLTips.com website. If you’ve never worked with SSIS before, it helps if you’ve seen part 1. The abstract: In this webinar, we build upon the Getting Started with SSIS webinar. You already know how to […]
Dynamic Datasets in Azure Data Factory
With “dynamic datasets” I mean the following: a dataset that doesn’t have any schema or properties defined, but rather only parameters. Why would you do this? With a dynamic – or generic – dataset, you can use it inside a ForEach loop and then loop over metadata which will populate the values of the parameter. […]
dataMinds Saturday Recording Available
I did a session on data visualization best practices on the past dataMinds Saturday virtual conference. The recording has now been made available at the AE website. They used the web infrastructure of their own webinars, so you have to register to view the recording (we’re GDPR compliant if you’re worrying about your privacy). So […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Getting around the 10 Minute Limit
This is the final blog post of this series on how to extract data from the Exact Online REST API with Azure Data Factory. I’ve you followed along with the previous posts, you’ve seen how you can request new refresh/access tokens from the API, how you can extract data from an endpoint for multiple divisions […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Dealing with Pagination
Some endpoints don’t have that much data, both others certainly will, for example financial transactions. The REST API limits the number of records it returns, and for most endpoints this is 60 records. After the first 60 records, you get a link at the bottom of the response that points to the next 60 records. […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Retrieving Data from an Endpoint
Finally we’ve come to the core of this blog post series: extracting data from a REST API endpoint. Just to recap, you need the following: an access token that is currently valid. See this blog post. a list of divisions. See the previous blog post. As an example, we’re going to read from the Projects […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Retrieving the Divisions
In many ERP software you have the concept of “companies” or “divisions”, a way of logically dividing resources and assets. For example, if you have a company and a sister-company, you can create two divisions to keep everything separate. When you read data from an Exact Online API endpoint, you need to specify for which […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Getting a new access token from ADF
Before we create pipelines to fetch data from the REST API, we need to create a helper pipeline that will fetch a new access token. This pipeline has the following format: Get the last known refresh token from the database (or whatever storage you use). You need to have manually retrieved the first pair of […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Fetching your first refresh/access tokens
To get data out of the REST API of Exact Online, we first need to authenticate ourselves. With APIs, typically tokens are used: a long string of symbols that will serve as a secret. You pass a token to an API, which will check if the token is valid and if it grants you access. […]
Azure Data Factory and the Exact Online REST API – Introduction
I’m going to do a small blog post series on how to extract data from a REST API using Azure Data Factory. I’m going to use the Exact Online REST API, because it has a series of challenges: a complicated process to get your first access token endpoints with more data will use pagination a […]