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Quickbase, Pipelines, and SharePoint Lists

By Bree Mackey posted 09-14-2020 12:23

  

Quickbase, Pipelines, and SharePoint Lists

You may find yourself at times needing to share data out to non-Quickbase users within your organization. Maybe there’s an application with country travel advisories that automatically updates itself, and your co-workers who travel could benefit from seeing these. But Quickbase hasn’t been introduced in their department yet, so how do we get them this valuable information? Enter Pipelines and SharePoint Lists!

 

TL;DR – If you want to skip to the good stuff, download the Pipelines – SharePoint Lists application from the App Exchange to either import the YAML or follow the step-by-step instructions located in the Documents table.

 

You may have seen my demo in the Exchange called Pipelines – Jinja JSON Object Import. In that demo you’re walked through how to import and update country Travel Advisories into Quickbase from an external API source. This demo builds on that use case, as we now want to move that information in a SharePoint List to share with our teams.

 

I started by creating my list in SharePoint. While Quickbase can do this for us, it’s more efficient in this scenario to continually update the Items on the List, rather than create a new List every day. I renamed the Title column (as it’s a required field by SharePoint) to Country Name. I then created my columns for Continent, Score and Message, with their respective field types (single line of text, number, multiple lines of text).

Next up, I returned to my Pipelines tab in Quickbase. I start off with searching my Travel Advisories table to return all of my records. In this scenario we’re not filtering the search as the number of countries does not fluctuate often, so the number of records returned (237) is manageable. For larger tables, you’ll want to be sure to add filter criteria rather than trying to parse thousands of records. I select the fields that I want to update in the SharePoint list: Continent, Country Name, Message, and Score. This way I’ll be able to access this data later in the Pipeline.

 

Now we need to search our SharePoint Items. This will allow us to match them up with the records we returned in our Quickbase search.

 

For each Item found, we’re going to update that Item in our SharePoint List. We’ll be updating the Message and the Score for those countries that already exist in our List.

But what if a new country is present in our Quickbase app? We’ll want to create that Item in our List. To do this, we’ll insert a condition under Step B (not in the same branch as Step C) which directs the Pipeline what to do if Step B is empty.

Under ‘Then’, we’ll create an Item in our List containing the Country Name, Message, Score and Continent.

And now, you’re all set! Schedule the Pipeline to run after the Pipeline which updates the Quickbase application from the external API each day, and you’re getting information to whomever needs to see it!

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