API Integration for Magazine Archive App

Job Information

Callum Boase
June 20, 2020
Knack, Web Development,
API Integration, CSS, Google App Script, Javascript / Jquery, and Zapier

Job Description

The Research Society needed help extending the native functionality of their online database / web app built in the low-code web app creation software called Knack.

Their app contains an archive of magazines, but manually uploading to the archive was slow, so they wanted to integrate the app with Google Drive, so magazine PDFs uploaded to Google Drive automatically populate their app’s database with data, including a link to the PDF file, a thumbnail and various meta data about the magazines.

Matt, the developer of the database, had achieved partial success before he contacted us, and we finished off the integration for him, applying a hybrid solution that used Zapier (a no-code API integration tool) alongside custom code written in Knack’s API with Javascript and CSS, and a mini-web app written in Google App Script.

The integration has been succesfully running since we completed this job, and it’s helped them greatly reduce the time they spend on manual data entry.