Airtable

Reporting with Airtable

Katie Murff|15 Jun, 2019

Do you create the same ticket report every month? Do you rearrange and hide columns?

Portfolio owners and co-owners can export ticket data to an Airtable base for these reports. Create a view in the base with the columns you need, and the tickets will automatically appear in that view. Below are the steps to set this up. Note, this is available for paid portfolios only.

To export ticket data:

  1. Sign up for an Airtable account
  2. Copy the BIM 360 Ops base embedded below by clicking Copy base in the footer
  3. Enter the PAT (Personal Access Token) and Base ID to connect your portfolio to the base
    • In Airtable, while on the newly cloned BIM 360 Ops Tickets base, click on Help, then select API documentation
    • In the “Introduction” section of the API documentation page, find the listed ID of the base. The base ID will begin with the letters “app”, for example “appickWGVOtxboc17”
    • Generate a PAT (Personal Access Token) for the base
      • Follow the links to go to the “personal access token” page. The page URL should be https://airtable.com/create/tokens
      • Click “Create new token”
      • Enter a token name
      • Add two scope entries: “data.records:read” and “data.records:write”
      • Click “Add a base” and select the BIM 360 Ops Tickets base that was cloned earlier
      • Click “Create Token”
      • From the dialog that pops up, copy the token txt and save it in a safe location.
    • In the BIM 360 Ops Settings page, enter the generated PAT and the Base ID in the “connect to Airtable” section. Once these two values are pasted in, the page will attempt to connect to the Base. This can take a few seconds and it should result in the message “Airtbale connected”.
  4. Tap the Export to Airtable button to export existing tickets. We recommend initially syncing tickets created this month
  5. To set up your routine reports in Airtable, tap on Grid View, and Add a new Grid. In the new view, you can reorder and hide columns. Do not rename or delete columns
  6. To disconnect the base, delete the API and Base keys

Notes:

  1. Portfolios with a lot of tickets may take several hours to copy
  2. When syncing existing tickets, duplicate tickets may appear in the base
  3. Changing the building name or prefix will result in duplicate tickets in the base
  4. Remove an assigned user from a ticket, the user and their hours worked are deleted from the Airtable record. BIM 360 Ops retains the user and their hours worked.

Click Copy base in the lower, right corner to copy the BIM 360 Ops base template.