How to connect to Google Analytics Data API in Flash

zedia.net — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:21:43 +0000

In one of my previous post, I explained how to connect to Google Analytics Data API in AIR. The problem with that way of connecting was that it only worked in AIR. In Flash it works locally, but as soon as you put in on your web server it stops working. Not it is cool to build an AIR (desktop) application that pulls data from Google Analytics, but it would also be cool to build a web application that does the same thing. Well I found out how to do just that. It is a bit more complicated because it involves a bit of server side coding, in this case PHP.

How the process works is that first you login to Google Analytics, Google will then send you a token that you must use when asking for data. So we will have two simple PHP files; one to login in and one to ask for data.

The first one looks like this:


//this file is called get_token.php
$user = $_REQUEST[user];
$pass = $_REQUEST[pass]
 
require_once 'curl.php';
$curl = new Curl;
$response = $curl-&gt;post('https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin', array(accountType => "GOOGLE",  Email =>$user, Passwd => $pass, service => "analytics", source => "zedia-GAStats-0" ));
$tempArray = explode("Auth=", $response);
?>

	 echo ($tempArray[1] ); ?>

The second one looks like this:


//this file is called call_ga.php
require_once 'curl.php';
$url = $_REQUEST["url"];
$token = $_REQUEST["token"];
 
$curl2 = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl2, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($curl2, CURLOPT_HEADER, "0");
curl_setopt($curl2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($curl2, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
 
curl_setopt($curl2, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=' . $token));
$response2 = curl_exec($curl2);
echo ($response2);
?>

As you can see to make my calls to Google I am using the cURL library that is usually already installed on your server if you have PHP. Also for the get_token.php I am also using the Curl class, made by Sean Huber, that just makes it easier to work with cURL. Upload these files to your server. Now that we have the server side figured out, we can move on to the Flash part; here it is:

package
{
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.URLLoader;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
import flash.net.URLVariables;
import flash.text.TextField;
 
public class Main extends Sprite
{
  private var loader:URLLoader;
  private var _loader2:URLLoader;
  private var _textField:TextField;
  private var _token:String;
  private var _buffer:String = "";
  public function Main():void
  {
    loader = new URLLoader();
    loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, _onTokenLoaded, false, 0, true);
   //this call will load the token
 
    loader.load(new URLRequest("http://www.YOUR_URL_WHERE_THE_PHP_RESIDE.net/get_token.php?user=YOUR_USERNAME&pass=YOUR_PASSWORD"));
 
    _textField = new TextField();
    _textField.height = 300;
    _textField.width = 300;
    _textField.multiline = true;
    _textField.wordWrap = true;
 
    addChild(_textField);
  }
 
  private function _onTokenLoaded(event:Event):void {
    var tempString:String = String(loader.data);
    tempString = tempString.substring(1, tempString.length);
    var tempXML:XML = XML(tempString);
    _token = tempXML.token;
 
    _textField.text = _token;
 
    _loader2 = new URLLoader();
    _loader2.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, _onFeedLoaded, false, 0, true);
 
    var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.YOUR_URL_WHERE_THE_PHP_RESIDE.net/call_ga.php");
    var urlVar:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
    urlVar.token = _token;
    urlVar.url = "https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/default";
    request.data = urlVar;
 
    _loader2.load(request);
  }
 
  private function _onFeedLoaded(event:Event):void {
    _textField.text = String (_loader2.data);
  }
 }
}

What you basically do is that you use your server to do all the communication between the Flash and Google. Everytime you will want a different feed to get different data you will call the call_ga.php file. It is that simple. If you have any question on this feel free to ask them in the comments.

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How to connect to Google Analytics Data API in Flash