Introducing ZenDash – TSC.03
The ZenDash project, is an idea I had after we opened our first restaurant Los Tontos! ZenChef is an amazing tool, pricy, but amazing. It has so many options and exceptions that it does require a learning curve to get it exactly how you want it to be.
The Dashboard Problem
In ZenChef you can see your data and reservations day per day, or on the dashboard it compares your current month with your previous month. But there are no more settings than that. I cannot go to the next or previous month, or click on any of the numbers to see some more information.
On the reservations page, I can see all our reservations for that day. I can navigate between days, and change the view of the day, but I cannot see our restaurant performance on a weekly or monthly basis. If we upgrade our account, we do have access to the calendar view, but you still need to make the calculations yourself if you like to see some totals.
Of course, we don’t upgrade to a higher plan just for a monthly overview.
ZenChef API
I reached out to ZenChef support to ask if they have API access, and they replied that API access is only for premium customers. Which we are not, as we’re on the lowest plan.
Unfortunately for me, this was a bummer for my plan of playing around and seeing if I can improve the dashboard a bit so we can see the data exactly how it’s interesting for us to see them. The current dashboard doesn’t give much detailed feedback on our restaurant’s performance.
When navigating in the ZenDesk app from between days to check our reservation, I checked the network tab in Chrome to see if they are making any API requests themselves… and it turns out they do!
They do use their own API to retrieve their data in the app, so lucky for me I could try this out and see if I can send the same request from my own device as well.
We need to check the headers of what’s being sent together with the request: our API key (which everyone has for the reservation widget) and our restaurantID. The payload of the request is the date of the day I would like to retrieve, as the /daily request only shows information for one specific day. I assume they also have monthly requests, but our plan does not have that, so I cannot peak at how they setup those requests.
With this information, I quickly tested on my machine using Bruno if I was able to get a response too. In between our other projects I just created a GET call to see if I pass the correct headers and parameters, I would actually also receive the right data. And it did!
Big win! My idea of creating a small, personal ZenChef dashboard for my personal use could continue. Happy me!
Back to all articles