connecting google analytics data api to dojo charts - php backend

Question

I'm looking at feeding dojo charts with data from google analytics, within a Zend Framework app. Has anyone done this or have any overview as to how I would go about it? I see there is a dojox.data.GoogleSearchStore. Does it make sense to have a dojox.data.GoogleAnalyticsStore and is anyone working on something like this?

Answer 1

I did a project recently doing this exactly - presenting data from the Google Analytics API using Dojo Charts. I'm not sure if the approach I used was the best, but I can at least give you some pointers.

Daniel Hartmann has a proposal for a Zend_Gdata_Analytics component. It hasn't been approved yet however you can find his code on Github and it works perfectly. I used this to get all the data I needed from analytics.

The Google Analytics API itself is quite powerful but it takes a while to get your head round it. Try and understand the difference between dimensions and metrics from Google's docs. It helps if you think of the service as building queries that return a table of data (like SQL), rather than just one value. In this table, each metric you add to the query adds a column of data to the result, and dimensions are used to restrict and group the data overall. So for example:

$ga->newDataQuery()
   ->addDimension(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::DIMENSION_DATE)
   ->addMetric(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::METRIC_VISITS)
   ->addMetric(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::METRIC_VISITORS)
   ->addMetric(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::METRIC_PAGEVIEWS);

gives you the total visits, visitors and page views for each day.

Analytics sometimes takes a few seconds to respond to queries (especially complex ones) so you'll want to cache the data. In my case I was selecting it at regular intervals by cron and storing it in a database.

On the Dojo side, I don't think dojox.data.GoogleSearchStore will help you. I used a combination of dojo.data.ItemFileWriteStore, dojox.charting.DataSeries and Zend_Dojo_Data, but I don't think my requirements would be typical. I'd suggest starting with the basics - get your graphs working with sample (hardcoded) data before your try and drop in your analytics. There are some tutorials on sitepen.com which I found useful.

Good luck!