monday.com Tutorial: Your First API Call Made Easy

Introduction

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use monday.com to transform your workplace and enhance your team's experience! So... without any further ado, let’s dive in!

What is monday.com?

monday.com is a revolutionary work operating system (Work OS) designed to enable organizations to build custom workflow applications without any coding. This allows teams to manage projects, processes, and everyday work seamlessly. With monday.com, you can shape workflows and projects through an adaptive platform that automates manual tasks and connects teams in a consolidated digital workspace.

The platform boasts a variety of features including customizable workflow templates, time tracking capabilities, automation options, data dashboards, and integrations with popular tools and apps.

New AI Assistant Feature

Exciting news for all users: the monday.com team has recently released a beta version of an AI assistant for their software! This addition is a game changer that will enhance user productivity and encourage more people to try out this fantastic platform.

Understanding the Monday API & API Key

monday.com offers the flexibility to build your own applications and insert them into their marketplace. This feature empowers users to create tailored applications and share them with others.

Creating such applications requires utilizing the monday API, which allows for external application integrations within your monday workspace. To access this API, you must retrieve the API Key. This process is well-documented on the monday.com site, and we will not cover it in this tutorial.

Coding: Setting the Stage

Dependencies

Let’s start with the design preparation by creating a project directory. Next, we will set up a virtual environment and install the necessary libraries. Once done, we will import these libraries into our main file.

Preparing Our Workspace

For the following project, we will create a simple workspace that comprises the boards required for our integrations. For additional details, please explore monday.com.

Building Monday API Integrations

Now, let’s start constructing our integrations. Our objective is to extract the necessary data and subsequently insert an item into our board. To kick things off, I will define a couple of constants: API_KEY and API_URL. Additionally, I’ll set up the headers that we will use for request authorization.

Remember, while working with the monday API, we are dealing with a GraphQL API. It is quite enjoyable to work with, and the documentation provided by the Monday team is exceptionally clear.

Executing Queries

Let’s execute a query to retrieve our board:

Response:

Next, I need to extract the group using the following query:

Response:

We still need to extract the columns:

Response:

Great! Now it’s time to insert new data into our board. Notice how this query differs significantly from the previous ones:

Response:

Let’s check out our results!

Conclusion

As you can see, leveraging the monday.com API is not as daunting as it seems. While it differs from traditional REST APIs, everything you need is well-documented. If you're eager to put the monday.com API into practice, I invite you to participate in our monday.com AI app hackathon! You certainly won’t regret it.