Formboard: combining Typeform and Geckoboard
There are companies which make it easy to collect data, and there are companies which make it easy to visualise data. Today I’m an engineer at Typeform, but I used to work for Geckoboard - a KPI dashboard platform. Having worked for both, I knew combining them would provide a great way to see the data you have collected. Typeform has webhooks to send results, and Geckoboard has an API to push data into the platform. It was a match made in heaven.
The project was simple and I was familiar with the APIs, so the main challenge was connecting them together. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out AWS Lambda, which I had heard so much about.
The lambda function itself was simple to set up but I had more trouble configuring the Amazon API Gateway to receive webhooks and post requests to Geckoboard. You do need to have paid accounts for both services though.
Technologies used
This project is great because…
The main benefit of the integration is that it makes results visible to anybody in real time, so there is no need to keep logging into the Typeform platform regularly to get the data. There are lots of times when this could be useful. For example, if you are using Typeform as an order form and you want to see how many items, and which ones, have been purchased.
Geckoboard also provides a different way of displaying results to Typeform’s. For example, if you want to see the number of responses received by hour, it's easy in Geckoboard, and if you want to look at the number of customer support tickets you have in a specific country, now you can.
Also, chances are that the responses to a typeform are only one part of your company’s key metrics. With Geckoboard you can display data from other sources alongside your typeform results.
Areas to improve
The main missing feature is that it does not yet support forms with payment fields. We are switching to a new way of authenticating APIs system in Typeform at the moment. Once that’s up and running I will need to update the project to use it.
Also, at the moment, each lambda function will only support webhooks from one typeform. If it turns out to be a useful plugin, in the future I may fix that, or contributors to the project are most welcome!
If you like the sound of the project, check it out on Github. Otherwise, check out the Typeform APIs and see what else you can build with them!
Thank you for reading! We are glad to share our experience and help everybody out there to code better.
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