Connect to Airtable Data from a Connection Pool in Jetty

The CData JDBC driver for Airtable is easy to integrate with Java Web applications. This article shows how to efficiently connect to Airtable data in Jetty by configuring the driver for connection pooling. You will configure a JNDI resource for Airtable in Jetty.

Configure the JDBC Driver for Salesforce as a JNDI Data Source

Follow the steps below to connect to Salesforce from Jetty.

1. Enable the JNDI module for your Jetty base. The following command enables JNDI from the command-line:

   java -jar ../start.jar --add-to-startd=jndi
   

2. Add the CData and license file, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory, into the lib subfolder of the context path.

3. Declare the resource and its scope. Enter the required connection properties in the resource declaration. This example declares the Airtable data source at the level of the Web app, in WEB-INF\jetty-env.xml.

   <Configure id='airtabledemo' class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
    <New id="airtabledemo" class="org.eclipse.jetty.plus.jndi.Resource">
    <Arg><Ref refid="airtabledemo"/></Arg>
    <Arg>jdbc/airtabledb</Arg>
    <Arg>
    <New class="cdata.jdbc.airtable.AirtableDriver">
    <Set name="url">jdbc:airtable:</Set>
    <Set name="APIKey">keymz3adb53RqsU</Set>
    <Set name="BaseId">appxxN2fe34r3rjdG7</Set>
    <Set name="TableNames">Table1,...</Set>
    <Set name="ViewNames">Table1.View1,...</Set>
    </New>
    </Arg>
    </New>
   </Configure>
   

   APIKey, BaseId and TableNames parameters are required to connect to Airtable. ViewNames is an optional parameter where views of the tables may be specified.

   • APIKey : API Key of your account. To obtain this value, after logging in go to Account. In API section click Generate API key.
   • BaseId : Id of your base. To obtain this value, it is in the same section as the APIKey. Click on Airtable API, or navigate to https://airtable.com/api and select a base. In the introduction section you can find "The ID of this base is appxxN2ftedc0nEG7."
   • TableNames : A comma separated list of table names for the selected base. These are the same names of tables as found in the UI.
   • ViewNames : A comma separated list of views in the format of (table.view) names. These are the same names of the views as found in the UI.

4. Configure the resource in the Web.xml:

    jdbc/airtabledb
    javax.sql.DataSource
    Container
   
   

5. You can then access Airtable with a lookup to java:comp/env/jdbc/airtabledb:

   InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();
   DataSource myairtable = (DataSource)ctx.lookup("java:comp/env/jdbc/airtabledb");
   

More Jetty Integration

The steps above show how to configure the driver in a simple connection pooling scenario. For more use cases and information, see the Working with Jetty JNDI chapter in the Jetty documentation.