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Empowering People Ethically with the leading open source alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites & apps and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. And we love Pull Requests!
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Export links should only contain the displayed information #7134

Open tsteur opened 9 years ago

tsteur commented 9 years ago

I used the export links in the Piwik UI today and was a bit surprised about the output. I was expecting to see only the displayed information in the output (what is displayed in the table). Instead the export link is only a plain API call which can contain lots of random information.

See eg this export link of Insights: http://demo.piwik.org/index.php?module=API&method=Insights.getInsights&format=XML&idSite=3&period=day&date=yesterday&flat=0&token_auth=anonymous&filter_limit=500&&reportUniqueId=Actions_getPageUrls&minImpactPercent=0.1&minGrowthPercent=1&comparedToXPeriods=1&orderBy=absolute&filterBy=&limitIncreaser=50&limitDecreaser=50&expanded=1

Instead I would expect to see only those 3 columns:

pages_insights

The same applies to all other reports/visualizations as in when I view the plain data table I expect it contains the same columns that are currently displayed with the same column names etc. If the visualisation is a pie, a cloud or evolution it would probably only have 2 columns.

This would make exports more useful in my opinion as one can for example directly open the CSV in Excel / OpenOffice and have useful names etc. Basically like the RSS export where translateColumnNames is applied etc.

Some people might be interested in the current output though. We do have the API page for this but maybe there could be even another icon or more entries in export for this

mattab commented 9 years ago

Not sure about showing only what's there on the screen... maybe we need some kind of "Data Export wizard window" to let users decide which columns to export, and configure all that is useful to configure, etc. By default IMO it's better to export all data to make sure user is aware of all data available to her.

tsteur commented 9 years ago

I wouldn't like a wizard. IMO when you see that export you expect to have the same data in the exported file as seen. What does it help you when you see all the data but can't use it? It might be better to have maybe "Export" and "API" both open the list as currently with different formats. While exports gives you the same information as displayed, API actually does the current behavior