Grabbing External Data on the fly

Hi there

It sounds like you're interested in using Lucid's Extension API to create a custom button that can connect to an external API and retrieve data to display inside another shape. This is indeed possible with Lucid's Extension API.

To get started you can explore our SDK to familiarize yourself with the capabilities and tools available.

I'll be meeting with one of our engineers next week to craft a more detailed response and provide you with specific guidance on how to achieve your goal. In the meantime it would be helpful to gather some more information about your project. Could you please provide additional details about the specific API you want to connect to and the type of data you intend to display inside the shape? This will allow us to provide you with more tailored guidance when we follow up next week.

Looking forward to assisting you further!

Hi @axel r while it is possible to create this button it would require some custom development to make it automatic.

Without developing a custom extension to Lucidchart you could use the Actions > Link to Web feature to hit a URL that then communicates with the external API and collects the response. Externally to Lucid this response could be auto-populated to a dataset that is linked to your Lucidchart document (via the Data Linking feature). Perhaps a Google Apps Script could be used for this step if you're using Google Sheets. Google Sheets will automatically refresh to include the response which could then appear on your document in a shape linked to that specific row in the dataset. If your Lucidchart document is linked to an Excel file or .CSV then a manual refresh of the linked dataset will be required.

Alternatively you could develop a custom extension to Lucidchart using the classes described in this Developer Community post. You can find an example of this implementation in our sample-lucid-extensions repo.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns and we're happy to help!