Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for IBM Cloud Data Engine provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete IBM Cloud Data Engine data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search IBM Cloud Data Engine 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 IBM Cloud Data Engine data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as IBMCloudDataEngineConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to IBM Cloud Data Engine data, separated by semicolons.

  IBM Cloud Data Engine uses the OAuth and HMAC authentication standards. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

• 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 IBM Cloud Data Engine data, such as UserId.
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 Jobs WHERE UserId = '"&B7&"'","Api Key="&B1&";Instance CRN="&B2&";Region="&B3&";Schema="&B4&";OAuth Client Id="&B5&";OAuth Client Secret="&B6&";Provider=IBMCloudDataEngine",B8)
3. Change the filter to change the data.