How to Build an ETL App for Zenefits 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 Zenefits-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading Zenefits data. This article shows how to connect to Zenefits with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load Zenefits data.

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

Connecting to Zenefits Data

Connecting to Zenefits 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 Zenefits Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Zenefits.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Zenefits (see below).

Zenefits API Profile Settings

In order to authenticate to Zenefits, you'll need to provide your API Key. To create an API Key, from your account head over to Company Overview > Custom Integrations, then besides Rest API Access select Add Token. Set the API Key in the ProfileSettings property to connect.

After installing the CData Zenefits Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing Zenefits 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 Zenefits 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 Zenefits Connector to create a connection for working with Zenefits data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Zenefits.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=my_api_token';")

Create a SQL Statement to Query Zenefits

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

sql = "SELECT Id, Title FROM People WHERE Status = 'active'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the Zenefits Data

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

Loading Zenefits Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with Zenefits 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 Zenefits data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

Full Source Code

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

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Zenefits.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=my_api_token';")

sql = "SELECT Id, Title FROM People WHERE Status = 'active'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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