Hello. I’ve spent multiple hours trying to connect a Kobo project to Power BI following the official documentation at Connecting Kobo to Power BI AND Synchronous Exports. Each time I try I get a 404 Not Found error.
I’ve looked at related Community Forum postings such as this, this, this and this.
@Kal_Lam or others - any assistance would be appreciated. Does the official documentation only work if making data public, which is not an option at all for this project? I’ve found some workarounds with JSON, but just trying to understand this better. Thank you!
Maybe I can be of help. I wrote one of the posts you were referring to. At first we were also unable to solve Kobo - Power BI connection issues but we were able to get a support contract and also reached out to the tech people at the World Bank. Together they pointed us in the right direction.
I’m now on my way to the office, once I’m there I can copy paste some of the information that we received per mail. Maybe this is already of help to you.
Could you provide us with some more information on the number of submissions and in what format you would like to download the data?
Many thanks Neil! I don’t have a strong preference on format for data download (as far as I know) as long as it supports the full range of Power BI functionality. It’s a new project so less than a thousand submissions currently. In an ideal world (i.e. if program continues/grows), submissions could grow into the tens of thousands.
We don’t use the synchronous exports because it has a timeout of 120 seconds. At that time, even with ‘only’ 12k submissions or so we faced timeouts.
We (still) use the V2 JSON API and have over 66k submissons. Downloading the data should be pretty straight forward. In Power BI select get data and pick web. Then paste the URL below.
Thanks Neil! I’m now having success connecting with your instructions, as well as with this JSON format: https://kobo.humanitarianresponse.info/assets/[UUID]/submissions/?format=json
I’m also now able to connect using the Kobo documentation and Synchronous Exports.
The error I was making (apparently) is that, since I haven’t made my data public, I always need to connect to Web via the Advanced (rather than Basic) option and always add my API token in the HTTP Request Header Parameters per below.
@Adaptation_Forest previously I faced the same issue but the only solution I have used is to allow third party application like PowerBI to access my data… glad Jason does some trick, but I have not found any other solution to that effect.
Alex.
I’m sure there is, let’s see what we can do! Maybe you could copy paste the URL you’re trying to use and also drop a screenshot of the Power BI menu where you’re entering this URL?
Are you on the humanitarian or non-humanitarian server? Occasionally it happens that people copy / paste the URL from a forum post whilst having their project on the other server. That also results in a 404.
