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Connect Airtable to your preprocessing pipeline, and use the Unstructured Ingest CLI or the Unstructured Ingest Python library to batch process all your data and store structured outputs locally on your filesystem.

The requirements are as follows.

By default, Unstructured processes all tables from all bases within an Airtable organization. You can limit the tables that Unstructured ingests data from within Airtable by specifying a list of Airtable paths. An Airtable path uses the following structure: base_id/table_id(optional)/view_id(optional)

For example, given the following example Airtable URL:

https://airtable.com/appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn/tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit/viwDcpzf9dP0Gqz5J
  • The base’s ID is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn. The base’s path is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn.
  • The table’s ID is tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit. The table’s path is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn/tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit.
  • The view’s ID is viwDcpzf9dP0Gqz5J. The view’s path is appr9nKeXLAtg6bgn/tblZ8uT1GY7NLbWit/viwDcpzf9dP0Gqz5J.

You can call the Airtable API to get lists of available IDs for Airtable bases, tables, and views in bulk, as follows:

The Airtable connector dependencies:

CLI, Python
pip install "unstructured-ingest[airtable]"

You might also need to install additional dependencies, depending on your needs. Learn more.

These environment variables:

  • AIRTABLE_TOKEN - The Airtable personal access token, represented by --personal-access-token (CLI) or personal_access_token (Python).
  • AIRTABLE_PATHS - The list of Airtable paths to process, represented by --list-of-paths (CLI) or list_of_paths (Python).

Now call the Unstructured CLI or Python. The destination connector can be any of the ones supported. This example uses the local destination connector.

This example sends data to Unstructured API services for processing by default. To process data locally instead, see the instructions at the end of this page.

For the Unstructured Ingest CLI and the Unstructured Ingest Python library, you can use the --partition-by-api option (CLI) or partition_by_api (Python) parameter to specify where files are processed:

  • To do local file processing, omit --partition-by-api (CLI) or partition_by_api (Python), or explicitly specify partition_by_api=False (Python).

    Local file processing does not use an Unstructured API key or API URL, so you can also omit the following, if they appear:

    • --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY (CLI) or api_key=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY") (Python)
    • --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL (CLI) or partition_endpoint=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL") (Python)
    • The environment variables UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY and UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL
  • To send files to Unstructured API services for processing, specify --partition-by-api (CLI) or partition_by_api=True (Python).

    Unstructured API services also requires an Unstructured API key and API URL, by adding the following:

    • --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY (CLI) or api_key=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY") (Python)
    • --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL (CLI) or partition_endpoint=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL") (Python)
    • The environment variables UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY and UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL, representing your API key and API URL, respectively.

    Get an API key and API URL.