What is Data Share?
Data Share delivers your TruRating results to you as scheduled CSV files, so you can load them into your own reporting, data warehouse or BI tools alongside your other business data.
TruHub is where you explore your results interactively. Data Share is for when you want the underlying numbers in your own systems: joining ratings to your sales data, building your own dashboards, or keeping a long-term history in your own data platform.
Each file covers a fixed period (a retail week, a retail period or a calendar month, or a single day as a premium option) across your whole organization, and is produced automatically once that period has ended.
Key terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Subscription | A standing instruction to produce a file on a schedule. It defines which template is used, how often a file is produced (the calendar range), which time zone the schedule follows, and how the file is delivered. You can have more than one subscription, for example a weekly file and a monthly one. |
| Template | The layout of the file: which columns it contains and at what level of detail. See Templates & Fields. |
| Calendar range | How much time each file covers: retailWeek, retailPeriod or calendarMonth, or daily as a premium option. See Delivery Schedule. |
| Execution | One run of a subscription, producing one file for one period. Each execution has a dateFrom and dateTo and a status. |
| Root Organization ID | The number that identifies your organization at TruRating. It appears in API paths and in your SFTP user name. |
How files are delivered
A subscription can deliver its files in any of these ways:
| Method | Best for | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Email with a link | People who open the file in Excel | Each file is announced by email with a secure download link. The link expires after a set number of days. |
| Email with an attachment | Where a link isn't practical | As above, with the file also attached as a zip. |
| SFTP | Automated loads into a data platform | Your systems connect to a TruRating SFTP endpoint and collect new files. |
| Web API | Automated loads, and teams who already work with REST APIs | Your systems request a token, list completed executions and download the files over HTTPS. |
Email suits people. SFTP and the Web API suit systems, and are the right choice for anything scheduled. Because they need credentials to connect, they're also the methods TruRating recommends for most organizations. See SFTP & Email Delivery and Web API Integration.
Privacy and anonymity
Data Share never includes anything that identifies an individual customer: no card details, no customer identifiers, no loyalty numbers, and no transaction identifiers.
Most templates are also aggregated. Instead of one row per rating, each row is a unique combination of outlet, date, question and score, with a count of how many responses it represents. On top of that, outlets with fewer than two transactions in a day are left out of that day's file, so a single customer's response can't be picked out.
Templates & Fields provides more detail, so you can decide which suit your organization's data policies.
What Data Share is not
- It isn't a live feed. A file is produced after its period ends and the data for every outlet is complete. Daily files cover yesterday, not today.
- It isn't a query service. Files follow the templates TruRating offers. You can't send an ad hoc query or ask for an arbitrary date range through the API.
- It isn't transaction-level. Data Share doesn't carry transaction IDs, so it can't be used to join a rating back to a specific receipt.
Reading order
- Requesting Data Share: what to decide before you ask, and what happens during setup.
- Delivery Schedule: which dates each file covers and when it arrives.
- Templates & Fields: the available templates, every column, and the CSV format.
- Your delivery method: Web API Integration or SFTP & Email Delivery.
- Working with the Files: loading files into Excel and BI tools, reading the numbers correctly, and troubleshooting.
Getting started
Data Share is available by agreement. To discuss it for your organization, contact your TruRating customer success director (CSD) or account manager.