Configure the CData JDBC Driver for Airtable in a Connection Pool in Tomcat

The CData JDBC Drivers support standard JDBC interfaces to integrate with Web applications running on the JVM. This article details how to connect to Airtable data from a connection pool in Tomcat.

Connect to Airtable Data through a Connection Pool in Tomcat

1. Copy the CData JAR and CData .lic file to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. The CData JAR is located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
2. Add a definition of the resource to the context. Specify the JDBC URL here.

   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.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Airtable JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.airtable.jar
   

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)
   

   You can see the JDBC URL specified in the resource definition below.

   <Resource name="jdbc/airtable" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" driverClassName="cdata.jdbc.airtable.AirtableDriver" factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory" url="jdbc:airtable:APIKey=keymz3adb53RqsU;BaseId=appxxN2fe34r3rjdG7;TableNames=Table1,...;ViewNames=Table1.View1,...;" maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="-1" />
   

   To allow a single application to access Airtable data, add the code above to the context.xml in the application's META-INF directory.

   For a shared resource configuration, add the code above to the context.xml located in $CATALINA_BASE/conf. A shared resource configuration provides connectivity to Airtable for all applications.

3. Add a reference to the resource to the web.xml for the application.

    Airtable data JSP
    jdbc/Airtable
    javax.sql.DataSource
    Container
   
   

4. Initialize connections from the connection pool:

   Context initContext = new InitialContext();
   Context envContext = (Context)initContext.lookup("java:/comp/env");
   DataSource ds = (DataSource)envContext.lookup("jdbc/Airtable");
   Connection conn = ds.getConnection();
    

More Tomcat Integration

The steps above show how to connect to Airtable data in a simple connection pooling scenario. For more use cases and information, see the JNDI Datasource How-To in the Tomcat documentation.