Airtable

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Connect Airtable to your preprocessing pipeline, and use the Unstructured Ingest CLI or the Unstructured Ingest Python library to batch process all your data and store structured outputs locally on your filesystem.

The requirements are as follows.

• An Airtable account. Create a free Airtable account.

• An Airtable personal access token. Create a personal access token.

• The ID of the Airtable base to access. Create a base. Get a base’s ID.

• The ID of the table to access in the base. Create a table. Get a table’s ID.

• The ID of the view to access in the table. Create a view. Get a view’s ID.

By default, Unstructured processes all tables from all bases within an Airtable organization. You can limit the tables that Unstructured ingests data from within Airtable by specifying a list of Airtable paths. An Airtable path uses the following structure: base_id/table_id(optional)/view_id(optional)

For example, given the following example Airtable URL:

https://airtable.com/appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn/tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit/viwDcpzf9dP0Gqz5J

• The base’s ID is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn. The base’s path is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn.
• The table’s ID is tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit. The table’s path is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn/tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit.
• The view’s ID is viwDcpzf9dP0Gqz5J. The view’s path is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn/tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit/viwDcpzf9dP0Gqz5J.

You can call the Airtable API to get lists of available IDs for Airtable bases, tables, and views in bulk, as follows:

• Base IDs
• Table and view IDs
• Base, table, and view IDs

The Airtable connector dependencies:

CLI, Python

pip install "unstructured-ingest[airtable]"

You might also need to install additional dependencies, depending on your needs. Learn more.

These environment variables:

• AIRTABLE_TOKEN - The Airtable personal access token, represented by --personal-access-token (CLI) or personal_access_token (Python).
• AIRTABLE_PATHS - The list of Airtable paths to process, represented by --list-of-paths (CLI) or list_of_paths (Python).

Now call the Unstructured CLI or Python. The destination connector can be any of the ones supported. This example uses the local destination connector.

This example sends data to Unstructured for processing by default. To process data locally instead, see the instructions at the end of this page.

CLI

#!/usr/bin/env bash

unstructured-ingest \
  airtable \
    --personal-access-token $AIRTABLE_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN \
    --output-dir $LOCAL_FILE_OUTPUT_DIR \
    --num-processes 2 \
    --reprocess \
    --partition-by-api \
    --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY \
    --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL

For the Unstructured Ingest CLI and the Unstructured Ingest Python library, you can use the --partition-by-api option (CLI) or partition_by_api (Python) parameter to specify where files are processed:

• To do local file processing, omit --partition-by-api (CLI) or partition_by_api (Python), or explicitly specify partition_by_api=False (Python).

  Local file processing does not use an Unstructured API key or API URL, so you can also omit the following, if they appear:

  • --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY (CLI) or api_key=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY") (Python)
  • --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL (CLI) or partition_endpoint=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL") (Python)
  • The environment variables UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY and UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL

• To send files to the Unstructured Partition Endpoint for processing, specify --partition-by-api (CLI) or partition_by_api=True (Python).

  Unstructured also requires an Unstructured API key and API URL, by adding the following:

  • --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY (CLI) or api_key=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY") (Python)
  • --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL (CLI) or partition_endpoint=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL") (Python)
  • The environment variables UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY and UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL, representing your API key and API URL, respectively.
  You must specify the API URL only if you are not using the default API URL for Unstructured Ingest, for example, if you are using a self-hosted instance of the Unstructured API.

  The default API URL for Unstructured Ingest is https://api.unstructuredapp.io/general/v0/general, which is the API URL for the Unstructured Partition Endpoint.

  If you do not have an API key, get one now.

  If the Unstructured API is self-hosted, the process for generating Unstructured API keys, and the Unstructured API URL that you use, are different. For details, contact Unstructured Sales at [e-mail].