PowerShell Scripting to Replicate Printful Data to MySQL

The CData Cmdlets for Printful offer live access to Printful data from within PowerShell. Using PowerShell scripts, you can easily automate regular tasks like data replication. This article will walk through using the CData Cmdlets for Printful and the CData Cmdlets for MySQL in PowerShell to replicate Printful data to a MySQL database.

After obtaining the needed connection properties, accessing Printful data in PowerShell and preparing for replication consists of four basic steps.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Printful Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Printful.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Printful (see below).

Printful API Profile Settings

In order to authenticate to Printful, you'll need to provide your API Key. To get your API Key, first go to 'Settings' then 'Stores'. Select the Store you would like to connect to, then click the 'Add API Access' button to generate an API Key. Set the API Key in the ProfileSettings property to connect.

Collecting Printful Data

1. Install the module:

   Install-Module APICmdlets

2. Connect to Printful:

   $api = Connect-API -Profile $Profile -ProfileSettings $ProfileSettings

3. Retrieve the data from a specific resource:

   $data = Select-API -Connection $api -Table "Orders"

   You can also use the Invoke-API cmdlet to execute pure SQL-92 statements:

   $data = Invoke-API -Connection $api -Query 'SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE Status = @Status' -Params @{'@Status'='inprocess'}

4. Save a list of the column names from the returned data.

   $columns = ($data | Get-Member -MemberType NoteProperty | Select-Object -Property Name).Name

Inserting Printful Data into the MySQL Database

With the data and column names collected, you are ready to replicate the data into a MySQL database.

1. Install the module:

   Install-Module MySQLCmdlets

2. Connect to MySQL, using the server address and port of the MySQL server, valid user credentials, and a specific database with the table in which the data will be replicated:

   $mysql = Connect-MySQL -User $User -Password $Password -Database $Database -Server $Server -Port $Port

3. Loop through the Printful data, store the values, and use the Add-MySQL cmdlet to insert the data into the MySQL database, one row at a time. In this example, the table will need to have the same name as the Printful resource (Orders) and to exist in the database.

   $data | % { $row = $_ $values = @() $columns | % { $col = $_ $values += $row.$($col) } Add-MySQL -Connection $mysql -Table "Orders" -Columns $columns -Values $values }

You have now replicated your Printful data to a MySQL database. This gives you freedom to work with Printful data in the same way that you work with other MySQL tables, whether that is performing analytics, building reports, or other business functions.

Notes

• Once you have connected to Printful and MySQL in PowerShell, you can pipe command results to perform the replication in a single line:

  Select-API -Connection $api -Table "Orders" | % { $row = $_ $values = @() $columns | % { $col = $_ $values += $row.$($col) } Add-MySQL -Connection $mysql -Table "Orders" -Columns $columns -Values $values }

• If you wish to replicate the Printful data to another database using another PowerShell module, you will want to exclude the Columns, Connection, and Table columns from the data returned by the Select-API cmdlet since those columns are used to help pipe data from one CData cmdlet to another:

  $columns = ($data | Get-Member -MemberType NoteProperty | Select-Object -Property Name).Name | ? {$_ -NotIn @('Columns','Connection','Table')}