To kick dashboard week off we were tasked with building an app in Alteryx which, when prompted by the user would return a certain category of crimes committed in a certain time period and then render a dashboard to visualize this data.

This was an Alteryx heavy challenge which was fun because as a cohort we had limited time to work on Alteryx in the weekly client projects. Luckily for us, in a session with Ben Moss we actually covered the crime data API, and so I referred back to this session in order to access location data for specific London Postcodes.

His workflow is shown below:

Once I had a user input which pulled the location data, I set up some user inputs for the category, start and end dates. This was tricky as I was unsure how to access the specified data, as the API only allowed you to select a specific month. To get around this, I created a text file with all the possible months and then append those months which fell within (and included) the selected time period. And then filtered accordingly. I then did some date creations and tidying up before outputting to a .hyper file to be used for my dashboard.

The final workflow is shown here:

And the App interface looks as follows:

Once I could access the relevant data via the app, I started building my dashboard. Due to the fact that you already filter to category in the app, this left minimal filtering options in the actual dashboard. It is therefore a fairly simple dashboard summarizing the data.

As shown, the dashboard tells you the postcode, category and date range you have selected - as well as the total incidents, incidents over time,  incident outcomes and a map of incident location.

All in all this was a fun project which challenged our Alteryx ability, and pushed us to integrate both Alteryx and Tableau together!

Bring on Tuesday!