Glen Mazza's Weblog

Updated February 2024

At work we use Domo for analysis of customer behavior. We have a need to retrieve data stored in Domo DataSets, which are its rough equivalent to database tables. While Domo offers their own Java SDK, it hasn't been updated lately, and so I thought it better to create my own client, leveraging what I had done earlier for a Salesforce CRM client, with its Spring OAuth client support. Note the client currently supports just DataSets, specifically querying dataset metadata and contents (methods are in DataSetQueryRunner). Domo offers several other APIs which the client can probably be expanded to support without too much difficulty, leveraging what the DataSet calls do.

The Java client is available in the blog-samples GitHub project. Steps to use:

1. Follow the Domo documentation to create a client ID and secret, and also to create an access token. In both cases, just the "data" scope is needed. The access token will not be used by the Java client, but will be used next to test permissions.

2. Confirm the client credentials have the permissions necessary to access the desired DataSets. Use the access token to list the DataSets you have access to and then query one or more. The list call will give you the DataSet ID needed for the subsequent query. If you cannot see the desired DataSet in the list call, or if the query is not returning the DataSet's rows, your account's permissions may need to be adjusted before proceeding further.

3. Confirm the Java client can work with those credentials. The RestServicesTest provides examples for querying DataSet metadata and contents. Update the desired queries with your desired DataSet ID and/or name as given in the comments. Also, follow the instructions in the resources/application-test.properties file for adding your client credentials, making sure of course to not accidentally move them to public source control.

4. Once all is configured, run the test class(es) from either from your IDE debugger or from the command-line (./gradlew clean build integrationTest) to ensure connectivity and functionality working.

5. The integration test for the content query mostly queries the returned metadata as querying specific data would be dependent on the DataSet that you plugged in. By running the test in an IDE debugger you can see the actual data returned, but a sample format is already given as a comment in the client's DataSetQueryResponse. Note the returned data, given as the List<List<String>> rows in this class, shows that all data is returned as strings and must be queried via row and column to retrieve:

   // for each row of DataSet
   for (List<String> row : response.getRows()) {
       // query the row's columns, converting to different types as desired
       String col1 = row.get(0);
       int col2 = Integer.parseInt(row.get(1));
       ...
   }
   

   Note the columns are ordered as they were in the query given in the DataSetQueryRequest.

Notes

1. Client credentials appear to be specific to the user creating them, and are hence limited to the DataSet access permissions that user has. Should the user lose access, another set of client credentials will need to be created.

2. Domo does not appear to have any direct support for pagination. If you have a very large DataSet, adding a column with an incrementing number, and using the column in a WHERE clause, may be the best option.

3. Another option for downloading large datasets, if your deployment has the memory available, there is also a domo.max.response.size.mb property used in the client's DomoOAuth2Config class that can be adjusted.