[ARBOR] Can you pull attendance marks into Power BI?

[Damon]

Hi All,

 

I'm looking into creating some Power BI Dashboards for Arbor schools but i've hit a bit of a hurdle from the outset. The Live feed works fine for getting basic stuff but there doesn't seem to be a way of pulling attendance marks during a period. I can only get a summation of marks during a period as opposed to the detail so it prevents me from doing the deep dive analysis I was hoping for.

 

I have access to the API but gathering data from there through Power Query also seems a bit of a minefield due to the data structure. From what I can see, I would have to do an API call per student for example. GraphQL through REST might be an option but I've not tried running this as a regular update via the Power BI Service.

 

Arbor seem to have a paid Power BI Connector which relies on Snowflake (3rd party data cloud) but if I have to go down that route then it's additional costs for the schools I work with.

 

Has anyone had any luck pulling raw attendance marks at all?

 

Thanks,

Damon

[RichP]

Having built some dashboards using live feeds I found that large data sets typically time out anyway. Our Arbor seems to be down at the moment but I think we pull lesson attendance via CRW.

 

Have you looked at BI connector pricing recently, they have changed to fixed price rather than per pupil, although don't forget your Power BI user licences too. Although looking quickly at https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/7745552147485-Microsoft-Power-BI-Connector-Datasets#attendance-0-0 and my Snowflake instance I don't think it extracts more than session marks.

[Damon]

Thanks Rich, I'll have a chat with them to see what the pricing is like. I spoke to David Pott yesterday and he confirmed the same, I need to be on Snowflake really. Though on the plus side he said that it's a decent platform which can easily handle 10m marks from his experience. Session marks is all I'm after and that attendance field list looks ideal.