SheetDream
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Quickstart
Quickstart
When you fire up SheetDream you'll be directed to the Data Sources tab. This is a strong indicator of where you should probably start in configuring your sheets!
Generally for most apps and configurations we recommend hooking up your spreadsheets (or tables, in the case of Airtable) with SheetDream before going any further.
If you wander over to the Tables & Activity tab, you will see a lonely table there called "users". This table was autogenerated for you by SheetDream and will contain one user with the username "system". This table is home for your API's users, and in this particular case your API will have only one user that can access it: the system user. For more information on this users table and how your API authentication works, head on over to the Authentication page.
Connecting To Google Sheets
In the Data Sources tab, there is a dropdown box labeled "Select Data Source". Clicking this reveals different data sources for your API. Select "Google Sheets" and you will be presented with this:
For our quickstart guide we're creating an API from a restaurant menu that we maintain within a Google spreadsheet:
IMPORTANT: Google Sheets Format
SheetDream expects the first row of your spreadsheet to be a header row, and the data to begin on row 2. Each column in row 1 of your spreadsheet will be interpreted as column names.
Click "Share" in Google on the top right. A new dialog will popup, asking if you'd like to share with specific email addresses, or for anyone with the link.
You can adjust the permissions as you see fit. If you decide to allow anyone some level of access with just a link (SheetDream included), you can do so with the bottom panel. If you prefer that only SheetDream be given access to read the spreadsheet, you can input the following email address in the top panel:
Copied!
This is SheetDream's service account email address.
After you've got your sharing permissions setup for the Google sheet, copy the URL.
Copy & paste the URL provided into the "Sheet URL" field in SheetDream:
Then, head back over to your spreadsheet. At the bottom of the spreadsheet you'll see the different sheets within the file. In our case we just have the one tab. Double click on it to copy & paste the sheet name into the "Sheet Name" field in SheetDream:
Lastly, you need to pick out a name for your destination table.
What is a destination table?
The way that SheetDream is able to create a high performance API from your sheets is by syncing and caching your sheet data. Your data gets synchronized from/to Google Sheets at a specific interval (usually every 1-3 minutes), and your API is served from a table within SheetDream. Your destination table is essentially what you want the name of the API object to be in SheetDream for this particular spreadsheet.
In our case, we simply insert "Menu".
Next, we check "Active", because we want this synchronization to be turned on and active the moment we hit "Save Changes".
Looking over our fields, everything looks good so we click on "Save Changes".
SheetDream should inform you that your changes were saved successfully. Next, you can proceed onto Tables & Activity, and after waiting a few minutes and hitting the "Refresh Data" button you should start to see your data filling out in the grid:
Your new API is now ready for consumption! Head over to the API tab to check it out.
Connecting To Airtable
In the Data Sources tab, there is a dropdown box labeled "Select Data Source". Clicking this reveals different data sources for your API. Select "Airtable" and you will be presented with this:
We're going to start by inserting our API key into the "API Key" field.
Where do I find my Airtable API key?
Within your Airtable base that contains the table you want to create an API from: if you click on the Help link in the top right corner, it will expand a new panel on the right hand side of your screen. At the bottom of the panel you'll find an "Additional Resources" section, and within there you will see a link for "API documentation". Clicking on this will open a new tab directing you to documentation specifically tailored for this particular base. This documentation contains both the base name as well as your Airtable API key.
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To expose my API key, I click "show API key" on the top right of the Airtable documentation. Then, if you head down to the Authentication section, in the curl tab you will see your API key here:
The string of characters to the right of "Bearer" is your API key. Copy & paste that value into the API Key field within SheetDream.
NOTE: do not share this API key with anyone else! Anyone who has this API key can make changes to your Airtable data.
Next, we need to input our base name into the "Base Name" field. Back in your Airtable documentation in the Introduction section, there is a sentence that says:
"The ID of your base is app____"
This is your Base Name. Base Names start with the app prefix and contain a random assortment of characters to uniquely identify your base. Copy & paste this value into the Base Name field in SheetDream:
Next, you need to input the table name that you want to pull data from. It should match exactly (casing and everything) what you have in Airtable:
In our case above, it should be "tweets" exactly:
Next, we have to select which View from Airtable we'll be synchronizing data from. By default, every new table within Airtable tends to get a default view called "Grid view", and that is what the default value is in SheetDream. If you have changed the view's name within Airtable to something other than "Grid view", you will need to change that value here as well. Otherwise, you can keep it set to "Grid view" which will pull in all of the fields from your Airtable.
Finally, we make sure "Active" is checked and we click "Save Changes".
SheetDream will attempt to make a call out to the Airtable API to grab data about your table to verify that the connection details you've entered are valid. Assuming it connects successfully, it will present you with a message saying "Successfully updated configuration."
What is "Allow SheetDream To Update This Table"?
Enabling this allows the API that SheetDream creates for you to make changes to your Airtable. If you POST, PUT, or DELETE data on the SheetDream API you will see those changes reflect within your Airtable as well.
Next, you can continue on to the Tables & Activity tab to wait for your data to sync from Airtable.
After a few minutes, clicking "Refresh Data" should reveal the data that SheetDream can see within Airtable:
Your new API is now ready for consumption! Head over to the API tab to check it out.
Last modified 5mo ago
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