Step 2: Adding a card to our Trello board via the API

We’ll be accessing the Trello API with our (secret) API key, so this needs to happen from trusted code rather than in the browser. So let’s add some server side code to our app.

In the App Browser, click the + next to Server Code to add a new Server Module.

Next, we’ll import both the Requests and json libraries at the top of our server module.

import requests
import json

Each call to Trello’s API will require the credentials we stored earlier in our App Secret service. To make it easier for ourselves, let’s create a variable for both the key and token at the top of our server module.

KEY = anvil.secrets.get_secret('trello-api-key')
TOKEN = anvil.secrets.get_secret('trello-token')

When a user submits an application, we want a card with all their details to be created in our Trello boards New applications list. That means our create card API call will require the New applications list ID. To find this ID:

1. Go to your Trello board
2. Add “.json” to end of the URL (For example, if your boards URL is https://trello.com/b/xyz/foo, open https://trello.com/b/xyz/foo.json)
3. Search for “New applications” with ctrl + F
4. You may find the ID in multiple places but it will look something like: "list":{"id":"5fb795244f9c3443ad4fa254","name":"New applications"}

Copy the ID and add it to the top of our server module.

NEW_APPLICATIONS_LIST_ID = '5fb795244f9c3443ad4fa254'

Now, we can define a function called create_card (which matches the function name we call in our form - see chapter 1 step 4. We will pass our create_card function the arguments name, email, phone, cover_letter and resume. Then, we can give the function the @anvil.server.callable decorator which allows us to call this function from client code.

@anvil.server.callable
def create_card(name, email, phone, cover_letter, resume):
  pass

Now, let’s make an HTTP request to create a new card. We’ll use the requests.request() function and pass it the arguments method, url and params.

The method to create a card is ‘POST’, the url is ‘https://api.trello.com/1/cards' and our params will be a dictionary containing our API key, API token, new applications list ID and the details of the job application.

@anvil.server.callable
def create_card(name, email, phone, cover_letter, resume):
  url = 'https://api.trello.com/1/cards'
  
  query = {
   # API credentials
   'key': KEY,
   'token': TOKEN,
   # List to create our card on
   'idList': NEW_APPLICATIONS_LIST_ID,
   # Set the card name to be the applicant's name
   'name': name,
   # Position the new card at the bottom of the list.
   'pos': 'bottom',
   # Add a description to the card containing the email, phone and cover letter
   'desc': f'''
      Email: {email}
      Phone: {phone}
      Cover letter:
      {cover_letter}
    ''' 
  }
  
  response = requests.request(
   'POST',
   url,
   params=query
  )

Now every time someone submits an application, a new card will be created. Next, let’s add each applicant’s resume as an attachment to their card.