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MINHAZ KAZI: Welcome to DataVis DevTalk.
I'm your host, Minhaz Kazi, Developer Advocate
for Data Studio.
In this video, we will show you how Community Connectors work.
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Community Connectors are custom connectors built in Apps Script
that you can use to connect to your own data.
To build a Community Connector, you'll
develop your code in Apps Script and then deploy the connector.
Then users can start using it.
Based on different user actions in Data Studio,
the Data Studio will execute the script
and invoke different functions.
Then based on the function response,
Data Studio will take different actions
and render the interface as well as the data on the screen.
In this video, we will show the Community Connector flow step
by step.
We will also show the expected outcomes
on screen and the user interactions
to help you understand how to develop your code.
When you develop your connector, you will write the code
and also provide certain metadata about your connector
in the manifest.
The manifest will be a file named appsscript.json,
and it will be a part of your Apps Script project.
We will discuss the manifest in details in a later video.
Your code can be in a single file
or distributed across multiple files in Apps Script.
For a basic Community Connector, you
will need to define four functions in your code.
The first function is getAuthType
that tells Data Studio the authorization
type for the connector.
The getConfig function tells Data Studio
how the user configuration screen should be rendered.
Then the getSchema function provides
the schema for your data.
Finally, the getData function provides the actual data
for the requested fields to Data Studio.
Now let's see how a typical connector
workflow would look like.
This is more of a simplistic example
to better illustrate how the connector workflow works.
Depending on your implementation and requirements,
this workflow might somewhat vary.
To use a connector, the user first
selects it in Data Studio.
In our example, we are showing the Google Fit connector
that lets you fetch your Google Fit data.
Once the user has selected the connector,
Data Studio now executes the connector script
and calls the getAuthType function.
Based on the response provided by the connector,
Data Studio will then trigger the required authorization
flow.
The user will see the AuthFlow on the screen
and complete it to provide authorization to the connector.
For our example, only the Google Authorization
is needed for the connector.
For your implementation, you might
need additional authorization from a third party site.
After the authorization is complete,
Data Studio will call the getConfig function
from the script.
In this function you can define what configuration information
you'd like to collect from the user.
Based on the response from the script,
Data Studio will render the configuration's interface
for the connector.
Here we can see that the Google Fit
connector needs only one configuration
input from the user.
It asks the user which type of data it should return.
The user completes all the necessary configuration
and clicks Connect.
At this point Data Studio has the necessary configuration
and calls the getSchema function to get the schema of the data.
It will render the field screen and let the user
update the schema if needed.
In our example, we can see that for the selected configuration,
the Google Fit connector has a schema with five
different fields.
The user clicks the Create Report button
to move on to the next step.
Now the user will be shown a blank Data Studio dashboard
where they can add charts and tables
to create their own report.
When the user adds a new chart Data Studio
will make the getData call to the connector script.
The connector will then fetch the data from the Google Fit
API and send it back to Data Studio.
Then, Data Studio will render the chart with the data.
This is basically how a Community Connector works.
Our example showed a full workflow from authorization
to rendering the data.
Now if I shared the Google Fit dashboard with someone else
and they view the dashboard, Data Studio
will only make the data calls to the connector
to refresh and update the data.
So when a dashboard is viewed only
the getData calls will get executed.
So that was an overview of how Community Connectors work
in Data Studio.
In our next videos we will show you step by step how you
can build your own connector.
You can always go to our developer site
at developers.google.com/DataStudio
for more information.
If you enjoyed this video, like and subscribe
to the GCP channel for more videos like this.
Thanks for watching.
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