Rick and Morty API (and DASHBOARD!!!!)

by Kinley Ly

For day 3 of dashboard week we talk APIs!!!

Looking at Andy Kriebal’s blog for The Data School (see his blog here!), we were given the task to create a dashboard using information from a Rick and Morty API. Having touched around APIs a while ago, it took a while trying to remember how to properly break down an API. Fortunately, a fellow Data Schooler had created a blog that goes step by step on how to break down the Rick and Morty API. (see his blog here! Thank you so much Liam!)


Following his detailed instructions, I was able to break down the API into usable data for my dashboard. While looking at the retrieved data, I noticed that the API that had featured an image associated with each character. Once I saw that, I had to include it into my dashboard somehow.

While on Tableau, I was told by my peers that recently, a feature was implemented that allowed the addition of images via urls in dashboards. This feature was released in the 2022.4 update, so just last month! Excited to use the feature, I immediately tried to test this.

This was the result I got:



The images wouldn’t load at all. I had been told that a possible reason for this was that if there were more than 500 different images in one dataset, then the images would not load at all. This should’ve been surprising since it was a very recent feature added. I looked around for an alternative answer for implementing images. One common answer I found was to have those pictures as shapes instead of using the Image Role function (because Image Role was unavailable at the time). This came at a cost however. By using this method, It was tedious, static, and would take a long time to do. Not only that, but there were at least 800 different characters in the dataset, each with their own image. I was not going to finish my dashboard if I had to do that.

So I looked for a workaround for the Image Role function. After spending a few hours pondering on how to fix the issue, I found a crude method that worked. Instead of inserting the dataset with 800+ images into Tableau as a single file, I instead tried to split up the dataset to two different files and simply insert both in the program. As a result, I would have 2 files that do NOT contain more than 500+ images each. This method worked! I was able to see the 800+ images, though with a lesser issue.


Some images were still unable to be properly loaded in Tableau despite this. On the bright side, I can see the majority of the images fine, but just some were still unable to be rendered properly. It wasn’t an issue with the URL (the url works fine), I believe it is still an issue with the Image Role function. However, the main objective was done (for the most part).

I went ahead and created my dashboard with the limited time I had left. (You can see it on Public here.)

When I uploaded my dashboard to Tableau Public, yet another issue was found with the images. Apparently, Tableau Public did not allow you to show more than 30 images at one time. So filtering may need to be used to properly see the images.

Despite this, the main part of my dashboard is still usable and I can (hopefully) consider this dashboard day finished!