Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Bugzilla provides formulas that can query Bugzilla data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Bugzilla 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 Bugzilla data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as BugzillaConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Bugzilla data, separated by semicolons.

  You can authenticate to your Bugzilla account using two parameters:

  • URL: The URL of your Bugzilla developer's page (the Home page).
  • ApiKey: API Keys can be generated from the Preferences -> API Keys section of your Bugzilla developer's page.
• 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 Bugzilla data, such as Creator.
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 Bugs WHERE Creator = '"&B3&"'","Url="&B1&";APIKey="&B2&";Provider=Bugzilla",B4)
3. Change the filter to change the data.