Azure Data Factory has a new activity introduced this week (around the 10th of March 2022 for you future readers): the Script activity! This is not to be confused with the script task/component of SSIS, which allows you to execute .NET script (C# for most people, or VB if you’re Ben Weissman). No, this task […]
Tag: adf
Extracting Data from the AFAS REST API with Azure Data Factory
AFAS is a Dutch business software company, proving companies with ERP and HR software-as-a-service. You can extract data from the service using a REST API (there are also SOAP web services available for those who appreciate the trip down memory lane). In this blog post I’ll show you how you can get data out of […]
Dynamically Map JSON to SQL in Azure Data Factory
We’re reading in some JSON files in Azure Data Factory (ADF), for example for a REST API. We’re storing the data in a relational table (SQL Server, Azure SQL DB…). The data volume is low, so we’re going to use a Copy Data activity in a pipeline, rather than a mapping data flow (or whatever […]
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. […]
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. […]