Airtable

Resources, Links

API REFERENCE: https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction
- There’s also a community-built API for Python specifically! Found here: https://pyairtable.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
  - This assumes you are using the API key, which will be deprecated (or possibly is deprecated by the time you read this). Sticking a personal access token for the right base (which is like the Airtable Excel .xslx file equivalent) in place of anywhere the API key is used will suffice.
    - Every developer needs to create their own personal access token to be able to run anything Airtable-related — keep it secret for security
    - For the time being we only need the data.records:read scope (and you’ll be able to set this when generating personal access token)
  - Highly recommend at least skimming Airtable API > Examples section and Getting Started sections
Airtable API encoder: https://codepen.io/airtable/pen/MeXqOg
Potentially handy?? Does also assume use of API key: https://dev.to/matthewvielkind/using-python-and-airtable-3bb7
On OAuth: https://oauth.net/getting-started/ (Not currently making use of this)

An Airtable environment has six main components:
- Workspace: a collection of bases
- Base: a collection of tables, looks like database, has all unique project information
- Table: like a spreadsheet, stores data in rows and columns
- View: different ways of looking at the data (grid view, gantt table view, gallery view, etc)
- Field: information; different field types include long data, image, date, audio
- Record: one row of the table
  - (this website is extremely vague and confusing but is the source here: https://hevodata.com/learn/best-airtable-examples/)
Uses REST api
- Means Representational state transfer: “a software architectural style that describes a uniform interface between physically separate components, often across the Internet in a Client-Server architecture” (Wikipedia)
  - You can expect this API to conform to REST design standards
  - More here: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/rest-apis

Log into Airtable account
Go to developer hub by clicking on account icon in the upper right corner and choosing from the dropdown menu
Click web developer api in the sidebar
Scroll to the bottom of the introduction page
Click on the base you want the base id for
On this new page, should be a line that says “The ID for this base is [BASE ID HERE]”.

Log into Airtable account
Click on the account icon in the upper right
Click on “Developer Hub”
Personal Access Tokens should be an option in the sidebar, create from there
- Make sure your scope is set to read, and that the environment variable on both your computer and in your IDE is set so that it’s TEMP_KEY=[YOUR ACCESS TOKEN] (without the square brackets)
for more help with this: https://airtable.com/developers/web/guides/personal-access-tokens

When you do a search with it using table.all(), you will get back results from that table in the form of a list containing a dict containing another dict that has all the data for one row of the table
- outer list is list of search results
- outer dict contains ‘id’, ‘createdTime’, and ‘fields’ of a record (one row of the table)
- inner dict associated with the key ‘fields’ is going to have key that is column header, and value that is the value for that particular row