One of the fun things about my job is its constant exposure to collaborative tools and tricks I’ve never seen before. <\/p>\n
Why collaboration is key for teachers<\/strong><\/p>\n Teachers have a hard job, not the least because if they can’t make it exciting every day, they’re not going to shoehorn much into the heads of the kids in the class. To do this, they have to make it “new” for themselves, as well. They’re always looking for new ways to look at their material, and often that means inviting their peers and mentors in, adding eyes and thoughts. <\/p>\n If that weren’t enough, it often seems as though the best<\/em> teachers treat their students<\/em> as collaborators. Or maybe, depending on personality, as co-conspirators. Either way, the point is that ideas are shared, are built together, and the experience of learning builds on the give-and-take, not just the original lesson plan.<\/p>\n In our district, we have used moodle<\/a> as a great way for experienced instructors to coach new teachers, and now it’s taking off for Distance Learning for students, as well. On both sites, the key is the collaboration fostered by the moodle environment, plus the ease with which people can construct and manage moodle content.<\/p>\n This week, looking for some new ideas for moodle add-in functionality, I found a list of web 2.0 apps in Campus Technology magazine<\/a> <\/em>. One of these tools also gave me a a great new way to gather sample reporting data: Factual.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n Factual<\/a> hosts what it calls a “living data ecosystem”, provided by its users and partners, enriched by data mining, aggregated and validated, and constantly improving. There are hundreds of thousands of datasets, in scores of categories (government, health, education, entertainment, etc). ‘<\/p>\n No matter what type of data I might need to illustrate a point, I’ll find it there.<\/p>\n You can download CSV files interactively from Factual<\/a>, which is okay as far as it goes, but not very exciting when you’re thinking about sourcing data for reports in an application. But Factual<\/a> also allows you to grab data, complete with filters and other options, using a simple URL\/REST-ful API. That is perfect for my needs. <\/p>\n BUT. The data comes back in JSON<\/a>… and JSON is not so perfect as a datasource for SSRS.<\/p>\n You may not dig Factual.com as much as I do, and you may not have to create sample datasets as often as I do… but I have a feeling you too will have reason to use JSON data at some point, and possibly want to analyze that data in an SSRS report…<\/p>\n So, I thought I’d share what I did to convert Factual json for use in SSRS reports. My conversion method is very simple, and easily decoupled from the particulars of my scenario. It would work for any data you downloaded in JSON but wanted to stuff into an RDL, I think.<\/p>\n Here are the three steps I’ll take, with the details and samples of what the data looks like at each step, so you can envision what’s going on:<\/p>\n Grab the data from its source, whatever that happens to be. In my case, that’s Factual, and the JSON return from its read method looks like this, per http:\/\/wiki.developer.factual.com\/w\/page\/29674488\/Read<\/a>:<\/p>\nWhen the MySQL tutorial data is not enough<\/h2>\n
What’s the catch?<\/h2>\n
Quick and dirty JSON-sourcing for SSRS<\/h2>\n
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