Question

I am building a Google Analytics Dashboard and have it pretty completed, but am just totally stumped on this one thing that is really hanging me up.

When I query the GA Core Reporting API for a dataset, I successfully get and am able to display results and everything works fine EXCEPT I am not able to query the JSON object for the “start-index”. That is, the first row that it will display (default = 1, but GA only returns 10k rows at a time, so if you have a data set with >10k rows, this becomes critically important!).

To attempt to get this integer, I use

$start = $results->query.start-index;

and as a check to make sure I am not insane, “max-results” is right next to “start-index” in the JSON object and this works fine:

$max = $results->totalResults;

Here is the GA JSON object (per https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v3/reference#startIndex)

{
"kind": "analytics#gaData",
 "id": string,
"selfLink": string,
"containsSampledData": boolean,
"query": {
  "start-date": string,
  "end-date": string,
  "ids": string,
  "dimensions": [
    string
  ],
  "metrics": [
    string
  ],
  "sort": [
    string
  ],
  "filters": string,
  "segment": string,
  "start-index": integer,
  "max-results": integer
},
"itemsPerPage": integer,
"totalResults": integer,
"previousLink": string,
"nextLink": string,
"profileInfo": {
  "profileId": string,
  "accountId": string,
  "webPropertyId": string,
  "internalWebPropertyId": string,
  "profileName": string,
  "tableId": string
},
"columnHeaders": [
  {
    "name": string,
    "columnType": string,
    "dataType": string
  }
],
"rows": [
  [
    string
  ]
],
"totalsForAllResults": [
  {
    metricName: string,
    ...
  }
]
}

Help! Thanks in advance

Answer 1

So I am still not entirely sure why this works the way it does, but I’ve successfully pulled the correct start-index number using the following function:

function getStartIndex(&$results) {
  $query = $results->getQuery();

  foreach ($query as $paramName => $value) {
    if($paramName == "start-index")
    $startIndex = $value;
  }
  return $startIndex;
}

This essentially loops through the entire $query associative array until it finds one where the parameter matches “start-index” and then returns the value.