using_pyairtable

Import Records from ServiceNow into Airtable

This code example can be used to update or insert ("upsert") the list of records from a ServiceNow Table into Airtable. You can schedule this script to run on a recurring schedule to keep your Airtable base "in sync" with ServiceNow.

This specific example syncs all records in the incident table in ServiceNow to Airtable and assumes your Airtable table has fields that match the values in lines 46-54 of example.py.

This code is based on the generic pyAirtable upsert example and uses pyAirtable (maintained by the community) to interact with the Airtable REST API and ServiceNow's python connector to interact with ServiceNow's Table API.

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The software made available from this repository is not supported by Formagrid Inc (Airtable) or part of the Airtable Service. It is made available on an "as is" basis and provided without express or implied warranties of any kind.

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Local setup

1. Clone/unzip code
2. Copy .env.example to .env and populate values
   • Explanations of each environment variable is available below
3. Install Python dependencies using pip3 install -r requirements.txt
4. Run python3 example.py to run the script

Key files and their contents

• example.py is the main code file which is executed when python3 example.py is run. At a high level, it performs the following:
  • Loads dependencies and configuration variables
  • Connects to Airtable and ServiceNow using the respective Python libraries
  • Queries all records from the specified ServiceNow and sets this list to the variable inputRecords
  • In chunks of 10, upserts records
• .env.example is an example file template to follow for your own .env file. The environment variables supported are:
  • AIRTABLE_API_KEY - your Airtable API key or personal access token
  • AIRTABLE_BASE_ID - the ID of your base; you can find this on the base's API docs from https://airtable.com/api. This will always start with app
  • AIRTABLE_TABLE_ID - the ID of the table you want to create/update records in; you can find this in the URL of your browser when viewing the table. It will start with tbl
  • AIRTABLE_UNIQUE_FIELD_ID_OR_NAME - the field ID or name of the field that is used for determining if an existing records exists that needs to be updated (if no record exists, a new one will be created). In this case, we use the record's system ("sys") generated ID.
  • SERVICENOW_INSTANCE_ID - your ServiceNow instance ID (for example, devXXX if your ServiceNow URL is https://dev158562.service-now.com/)
  • SERVICENOW_USERNAME - your integration account's username
  • SERVICENOW_PASSWORD - your integration account's password

Notes

• In this example, a ServiceNow username and password are used to authenticate with the API. Other options are also available and documented by PySNC here.
• The ServiceNow Table API appears to return date/time fields in the timezone of the authenticated user. Unless specified with a GMT offset (which the ServiceNow API does not appear to return), the Airtable API assumes timestamps to be in GMT. We therefore recommend configuring your integration user account in ServiceNow to use GMT.
• pyairtable handles API rate limiting
• The field used for uniqueness does not have to be the primary field.
• The field name for the unique field is expected to remain consistent. If it changes, update the environment variable
• Each existing and new record is expected to have a value for the field used for uniqueness.