How to Build an ETL App for FormSite Data in Python with CData

The rich ecosystem of Python modules lets you get to work quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. With the CData API Driver for Python and the petl framework, you can build FormSite-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading FormSite data. This article shows how to connect to FormSite with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load FormSite data.

With built-in, optimized data processing, the CData Python Connector offers unmatched performance for interacting with live FormSite data in Python. When you issue complex SQL queries from FormSite, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to FormSite and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations).

Connecting to FormSite Data

Connecting to FormSite data looks just like connecting to any relational data source. Create a connection string using the required connection properties. For this article, you will pass the connection string as a parameter to the create_engine function.

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

FormSite API Profile Settings

Log into your Formsite account and visit the Admin Portal to generate or retrieve your API key. Your

ServerNumber

is the numeric part of your server URL and

UserDirectory

is your account's directory path.

After installing the CData FormSite Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing FormSite through Python objects.

Install Required Modules

Use the pip utility to install the required modules and frameworks:

pip install petl
pip install pandas

Build an ETL App for FormSite Data in Python

Once the required modules and frameworks are installed, we are ready to build our ETL app. Code snippets follow, but the full source code is available at the end of the article.

First, be sure to import the modules (including the CData Connector) with the following:

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

You can now connect with a connection string. Use the connect function for the CData FormSite Connector to create a connection for working with FormSite data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\FormSite.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;ServerNumber=your_server_number;UserDirectory=your_user_directory';")

Create a SQL Statement to Query FormSite

Use SQL to create a statement for querying FormSite. In this article, we read data from the FormItems entity.

sql = "SELECT Id, Label FROM FormItems WHERE Position = '1'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the FormSite Data

With the query results stored in a DataFrame, we can use petl to extract, transform, and load the FormSite data. In this example, we extract FormSite data, sort the data by the Label column, and load the data into a CSV file.

Loading FormSite Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'Label')

etl.tocsv(table2,'formitems_data.csv')

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with FormSite data just like you would with any database, including direct access to data in ETL packages like petl.

Free Trial & More Information

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData API Driver for Python to start building Python apps and scripts with connectivity to FormSite data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

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Full Source Code

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\FormSite.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;ServerNumber=your_server_number;UserDirectory=your_user_directory';")

sql = "SELECT Id, Label FROM FormItems WHERE Position = '1'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'Label')

etl.tocsv(table2,'formitems_data.csv')