How to Build an ETL App for iContact 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 iContact-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading iContact data. This article shows how to connect to iContact with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load iContact data.

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

Connecting to iContact Data

Connecting to iContact 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 iContact Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\IContact.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for iContact (see below).

iContact API Profile Settings

In your iContact account, navigate to Settings & Billing > Integrations and create a Custom API Integration. Your AppId, Username, Password, and AccountId are all available on the Getting Connected page of that integration.

After installing the CData iContact Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing iContact 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 iContact 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 iContact Connector to create a connection for working with iContact data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\IContact.apip;ProfileSettings='AppId=your_app_id;Username=your_username;Password=your_password;AccountId=your_account_id';")

Create a SQL Statement to Query iContact

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

sql = "SELECT ClientFolderId, CampaignId FROM Campaigns WHERE Name = 'Summer Newsletter 2024'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the iContact Data

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

Loading iContact Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with iContact 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 iContact data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

Full Source Code

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

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\IContact.apip;ProfileSettings='AppId=your_app_id;Username=your_username;Password=your_password;AccountId=your_account_id';")

sql = "SELECT ClientFolderId, CampaignId FROM Campaigns WHERE Name = 'Summer Newsletter 2024'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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