Link Kobotools with Airtable

[Claudio_Brenni]

Hi everybody!

I’m new here and learning everyday some new incredible capabilities of Airtable.

I work for a not-for-profit organization and we often use Kobotools to collect data from our beneficiaries. Kobotools is an ODK based survey platform (kobotoolbox.org).

In Kobotools there is a built in REST service and I was trying to connect a an airtable table to Kobo, in order to create a new record with the results of the surveys. But I’ve no expirence with API and I’m really struggling to understand if it is possible to do that and if yes, how I can realize that.

Any help is greatly appreciated :slightly_smiling_face:

Many thanks,
Claudio

[Sergio_Usme]

Thanks @Claudio_Brenni for this great explaination! I've been looking for this for years! 🤓

I managed to send a couple of test submissions from my project in Kobo to Airtable, not using the API key in step 10, since is going to be deprecated, but the Personal Acces Token - PAT.

I'm currently exploring the right settings in Airtable according to the field type in Kobo, like single-select, multiple-select, attachments, dates, etc, as well as the way to set up "nested" records, like the ones in @Katie_Dowhaniuk 's example. I still have a question though. Maybe you know if it is possible to send not the XML value (yellow, down below) , but the label value (green)?

Thanks again.

Sergio

[Claudio_Brenni]

Dear Sergio,

Great that it worked also for you. I also need to change all to the personal Token system, as we are still relying on the API Key. 

For your question, I'm not sure that you can send the label because it all goes through the XML table that is generated by Kobo. As a workaround, you can rename manually the XML value. Be aware that you can't use spaces and special characters here, but you rename it as you want. 

Can I polite ask you how did you do with the Personal Token? It would be great if you can explain here what are the changes that are needed, so this tutorial remains up to date. 

Many thanks,

Claudio

[Sergio_Usme]

Sure thing.

This is just for step 10:

10.1 Go to https://airtable.com/create/tokens and select Personal access tokens on the left and then Create new token on the right

10.2 Give your token a Name, select the Scope (https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/scopes) and Access and then click on Create token 

10.3 As soon as you've done a prompt like this will be shown. Be sure of copying the token as it won't be accesible anymore

10.4 Go to Make and set the connection like this

Save and and that's it. Everything should work as you described.

Note: regardless of the warning in step 10.3 that quotes "Don't share it with third-party services and applications" I needed to provide the whole token into Make. First, I thought that the shortened version in the control panel would work, but Make did not recognize it. The only way I managed to make it work was providing the whole token. 

I do not fully understand the risks of doing this but it'd be great if someone in the community could give us any insights. 

On the other hand, I will keep searching for a way to send just the labels as XLM tags are kind of "machine" language, not suitable to automate interfaces to a end user. But having this first step done is very promising. There is a light!

Let me know how that PAT works.

Sergio