How to integrate with Airtable

Introduction

Airtable is a platform that makes it easy to build powerful, custom applications. These tools can streamline just about any process, workflow, or project—and best of all, you can build them without ever learning to write a single line of code.

You can use PDF Generator API Airtable Extension to quickly generate PDF documents using the data you already have in Airtable (e.g. store orders, database records etc.).

Add PDF Generator API Airtable Extension
View example documents
Download Scripting example from Github

Setup

To use PDF Generator API Airtable Extension, you need a PDF Generator API account. You can create a free Sandbox Account, and you can use the free Sandbox Account for 1 month to evaluate and integrate the API. The Sandbox Account allows you to make 2500 merges per month.

The monthly usage (merges) is calculated based on the number of document generation requests multiplied by the number of unique datasets. Read more

Extension Settings

In the Extension Settings, you need to specify API Key, API Secret, and Workspace Identifier. You can find your API key and API secret from the Account Settings view. The Workspace Identifier specifies the request context. Your default workspace identifier is the email you used to sign up for PDF Generator API.

Usage

The Extension has two main views - Generate to generate documents and Templates to manage your document templates.

Generate

In the Generate view, you can generate PDF documents using the data from your Airtable database. Select the records you want to use as the data source for your document to get started. Then select a template and click Generate.

Options
Wrap records to an Object? - When you have multiple records selected, each record is treated as a source for one document. When you enable this option, you can use all the selected records in a single document context, for example, create a list of items or show them in a table.
Template - Select a template or click the add button (plus icon) to create a new template. Click the edit button (pencil icon) to edit the selected template. The data from the selected record is available in the editor.
View (optional) - You can specify table view to optimize record loading.
Save to table field - This allows you to specify which field of the selected table you want to use to save the generated document. It can be Attachment, Text or URL field. If you choose a Text or URL field, then a public URL to file is saved, and it is valid for 30 days.
Name (optional) - You can specify generated file name.
Format - You can generate PDF or HTML documents using this Extension.
Output - You can specify different output types; a URL is returned from the API by default. You can also produce a raw or base64 encoded file to save to a Text field.

Templates

In the Templates view, you can create and manage your document templates. When you create or edit a template from this view, the currently selected records are taken as the data source for the document in the editor view.

Scripting

You can also use PDF Generator API with Airtable Scripting Extension and Automation. You can use the same API credentials as for the Extension. We have prepared an example code to demonstrate how it works. In the example implementation, we want to generate a PDF invoice for the order and store the result back in the Airtable database. We use two linked tables - Orders and LineItems. You can find the example implementation from our GitHub repository here.

Updated on: 14/08/2023