(Part 2) Update Records in NationBuild API using OpenRefine

This article is part of a series of tutorials to use NationBuilder API. We wrote them in collaboration with Campaign Gears. In the previous article, we explained how to retrieve people information via NationBuilder API. This article explains how to use OpenRefine to bulk update information via NationBuilder API.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions or need help to implement NationBuilder data integration project.

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(Part 1) Collecting data from NationalBuilder API with OpenRefine

This article is part of a series of tutorials to use NationBuilder API. We wrote them in collaboration with Campaign Gears. NationalBuilder is an online software that helps organizations to coordinate their community. It supports members management, web pages, finances, and online communications. NationalBuilder has an API that gives access to NationalBuilder's core features. 

The NationalBuilder API has extensive documentation and options to explore all available features. Using the API Explorer, you can explore the different API endpoints. These endpoints allow you to review all data available in the NationalBuilder API. You can learn more about the API in the Developer Blog and API Documentation.

The NationalBuilder API documentation provides examples of how to access the API with Ruby, PHP, and Python. In this article, we explain how non-developer can use the API thanks to OpenRefine.  We describe two techniques: one using cURL and OpenRefine and one using only OpenRefine.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions or need help to implement NationBuilder data integration project.

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Google Refine Uploader and Stats Extension

The Google Refine Uploader Extension allows you to export datasets from Google Refine and post them as JSON to web servers! Intended for use with CouchDB. Please note that this extension is a work in progress. Feel free to join and help 

Access the GitHub of the project.

This extension is based on the Chicago Tribune Stats extension. A tutorial is available on their blog. Please note that the extension does not work with Google Refine 2.5. It should be tested with the 2.0 version available here.

If you have installed and tried any of those two extensions, I`ll be pleased to hear from you!

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Data Shaping in Google Refine – Generating New Rows from Multiple Values in a Single Column

Data Shaping in Google Refine – Generating New Rows from Multiple Values in a Single Column

Great tutorial to reshape data set using transpose and fill down function. This article also introduce the split multi-valued cells function to split and transpose in one shot.

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Google refine ; JSON and my notepad or how to write script in google refine

One of the nice thing about google refine is that every action you do generate a JSON code. If we want to do a comparison with Excel, the JSON code generated can be compared to record a macro. The sweet spot of Google Refine is that you don't need to click on the record button, it keep track of all your actions automatically and that can be easily exported for back up or editing purpose.

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Replace month name by month number

An other quick JSON code to cut and past in your project and gain some time. This one replace all English month by their number so January becomes 01 ; February 02 and so on. It is based on the function replace and will avoid you to repeat the same action 12 times. Here a simple replace in bloc note (to update your column name) and apply and the trick is done.

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Parse mark up language (JSON, html, xml ...)

In this tutorial we will see how to parse mark up language like JSON, html or xml. Those language are great to parse because there is often an easily identifiable markup right before or after the content you want to extract.  In this tutorial we will use a JSON language and extract relevant information by following a six steps process.

On a similar topic:

• how google refine can be used to fetch website.
• a detailled tutorial to parse and extract HTML tag

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Extract from twitter hastag and reference

This case has been brought to me by cosmin who wanted to extract hastag from tweets for some analysis and data visualization. Data have been gather using ScraperWiki and their ability to scrap twitter data into one single document (see the video tutorial).

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JSON code to transpose important number of columns (grefine 2.1)

The code below transpose Column 1 to 19 into one single column. One can quickly edit and adapt this code to your project, open it in NotePade, and call the replace function (keyboard shortcut: ctrl+H). Then replace the term "column" by your column name.

Action describes in this is post are valid only for google refine 2.1 and previous version. If you are using google refine 2.5, please refer to the transpose column across rows article.

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Split cell content into multiple column, non fixed field length

I recently get a file to work on generated by crystal report and I had to deal with this format as no other were available. In my case, data were supposed to be split into 11 columns, in the original file there were all in 1, data were separated by a variable number of space. This post will present a process to split cell content when you have no markup. JSON code is provided for reference below.

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