How to Build an ETL App for FreshBooks Data in Python with CData

The rich ecosystem of Python modules lets you get to work quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. With the CData API Driver for Python and the petl framework, you can build FreshBooks-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading FreshBooks data. This article shows how to connect to FreshBooks with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load FreshBooks data.

With built-in, optimized data processing, the CData Python Connector offers unmatched performance for interacting with live FreshBooks data in Python. When you issue complex SQL queries from FreshBooks, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to FreshBooks and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations).

Connecting to FreshBooks Data

Connecting to FreshBooks data looks just like connecting to any relational data source. Create a connection string using the required connection properties. For this article, you will pass the connection string as a parameter to the create_engine function.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the FreshBooks Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\FreshBooks.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for FreshBooks (see below).

FreshBooks API Profile Settings

Register an OAuth application in your FreshBooks Developer Dashboard to obtain a Client ID and Client Secret, and configure the redirect URI to match your application's callback URL.

After installing the CData FreshBooks Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing FreshBooks through Python objects.

Install Required Modules

Use the pip utility to install the required modules and frameworks:

pip install petl
pip install pandas

Build an ETL App for FreshBooks Data in Python

Once the required modules and frameworks are installed, we are ready to build our ETL app. Code snippets follow, but the full source code is available at the end of the article.

First, be sure to import the modules (including the CData Connector) with the following:

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

You can now connect with a connection string. Use the connect function for the CData FreshBooks Connector to create a connection for working with FreshBooks data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\FreshBooks.apip;Authscheme=OAuth;OAuthClientId=your_client_id;OAuthClientSecret=your_client_secret;CallbackUrl=your_callback_url;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;")

Create a SQL Statement to Query FreshBooks

Use SQL to create a statement for querying FreshBooks. In this article, we read data from the Invoices entity.

sql = "SELECT Id, InvoiceNumber FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = 'your_account_id'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the FreshBooks Data

With the query results stored in a DataFrame, we can use petl to extract, transform, and load the FreshBooks data. In this example, we extract FreshBooks data, sort the data by the InvoiceNumber column, and load the data into a CSV file.

Loading FreshBooks Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'InvoiceNumber')

etl.tocsv(table2,'invoices_data.csv')

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with FreshBooks data just like you would with any database, including direct access to data in ETL packages like petl.

Free Trial & More Information

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData API Driver for Python to start building Python apps and scripts with connectivity to FreshBooks data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

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Full Source Code

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\FreshBooks.apip;Authscheme=OAuth;OAuthClientId=your_client_id;OAuthClientSecret=your_client_secret;CallbackUrl=your_callback_url;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;")

sql = "SELECT Id, InvoiceNumber FROM Invoices WHERE AccountId = 'your_account_id'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'InvoiceNumber')

etl.tocsv(table2,'invoices_data.csv')