Step 4: Connection Checking

The second operation in the Airbyte Protocol that we'll implement is the check operation.

This operation verifies that the input configuration supplied by the user can be used to connect to the underlying data source. Note that this user-supplied configuration has the values described in the spec.yaml filled in. In other words if the spec.yaml said that the source requires a username and password the config object might be { "username": "airbyte", "password": "password123" }. You should then implement something that returns a json object reporting, given the credentials in the config, whether we were able to connect to the source.

In order to make requests to the API, we need to specify the access. In our case, this is a fairly trivial check since the API requires no credentials. Instead, let's verify that the user-input base currency is a legitimate currency. In source.py we'll find the following autogenerated source:

class SourcePythonHttpTutorial(AbstractSource):

    def check_connection(self, logger, config) -> Tuple[bool, any]:
        """
        TODO: Implement a connection check to validate that the user-provided config can be used to connect to the underlying API

        See https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/blob/master/airbyte-integrations/connectors/source-stripe/source_stripe/source.py#L232
        for an example.

        :param config:  the user-input config object conforming the connector's spec.yaml
        :param logger:  logger object
        :return Tuple[bool, any]: (True, None) if the input config can be used to connect to the API successfully, (False, error) otherwise.
        """
        return True, None

...

Following the docstring instructions, we'll change the implementation to verify that the input currency is a real currency:

    def check_connection(self, logger, config) -> Tuple[bool, any]:
        accepted_currencies = {"USD", "JPY", "BGN", "CZK", "DKK"}  # assume these are the only allowed currencies
        input_currency = config['base']
        if input_currency not in accepted_currencies:
            return False, f"Input currency {input_currency} is invalid. Please input one of the following currencies: {accepted_currencies}"
        else:
            return True, None

Note: in a real implementation you should write code to connect to the API to validate connectivity and not just validate inputs - for an example see check_connection in the OneSignal source connector implementation

Let's test out this implementation by creating two objects: a valid and an invalid config and attempt to give them as input to the connector. For this section, you will need to take the API access key generated earlier and add it to both configs. Because these configs contain secrets, we recommend storing configs which contain secrets in secrets/config.json because the secrets directory is gitignored by default.

mkdir sample_files
echo '{"start_date": "2022-04-01", "base": "USD", "apikey": <your_apikey>}'  > secrets/config.json
echo '{"start_date": "2022-04-01", "base": "BTC", "apikey": <your_apikey>}'  > secrets/invalid_config.json
python main.py check --config secrets/config.json
python main.py check --config secrets/invalid_config.json

You should see output like the following:

> python main.py check --config secrets/config.json
{"type": "CONNECTION_STATUS", "connectionStatus": {"status": "SUCCEEDED"}}

> python main.py check --config secrets/invalid_config.json
{"type": "CONNECTION_STATUS", "connectionStatus": {"status": "FAILED", "message": "Input currency BTC is invalid. Please input one of the following currencies: {'DKK', 'USD', 'CZK', 'BGN', 'JPY'}"}}

While developing, we recommend storing configs which contain secrets in secrets/config.json because the secrets directory is gitignored by default.