Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Avro provides formulas that can query Avro data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Avro data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following: =CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the Avro data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as AvroConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Avro data, separated by semicolons.

  Connect to your local Avro file(s) by setting the URI connection property to the location of the Avro file.
• ResultLocation: The cell that the output of results should start from.

Pass Spreadsheet Cells as Inputs to the Query

The procedure below results in a spreadsheet that organizes all the formula inputs in the first column.

1. Define cells for the formula inputs. In addition to the connection inputs, add another input to define a criterion for a filter to be used to search Avro data, such as Column2.
2. In another cell, write the formula, referencing the cell values from the user input cells defined above. Single quotes are used to enclose values such as addresses that may contain spaces.
=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM SampleTable_1 WHERE Column2 = '"&B2&"'","URI="&B1&";Provider=Avro",B3)
3. Change the filter to change the data.