Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as ZuoraConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Zuora data, separated by semicolons.

  Zuora uses the OAuth standard to authenticate users. See the online Help documentation for a full OAuth authentication guide.

  Configuring Tenant property

  In order to create a valid connection with the provider you need to choose one of the Tenant values (USProduction by default) which matches your account configuration. The following is a list with the available options:

  • USProduction: Requests sent to https://rest.zuora.com.
  • USAPISandbox: Requests sent to https://rest.apisandbox.zuora.com"
  • USPerformanceTest: Requests sent to https://rest.pt1.zuora.com"
  • EUProduction: Requests sent to https://rest.eu.zuora.com"
  • EUSandbox: Requests sent to https://rest.sandbox.eu.zuora.com"

  Selecting a Zuora Service

  Two Zuora services are available: Data Query and AQuA API. By default ZuoraService is set to AQuADataExport.

  DataQuery

  The Data Query feature enables you to export data from your Zuora tenant by performing asynchronous, read-only SQL queries. We recommend to use this service for quick lightweight SQL queries.

  Limitations
  • The maximum number of input records per table after filters have been applied: 1,000,000
  • The maximum number of output records: 100,000
  • The maximum number of simultaneous queries submitted for execution per tenant: 5
  • The maximum number of queued queries submitted for execution after reaching the limitation of simultaneous queries per tenant: 10
  • The maximum processing time for each query in hours: 1
  • The maximum size of memory allocated to each query in GB: 2
  • The maximum number of indices when using Index Join, in other words, the maximum number of records being returned by the left table based on the unique value used in the WHERE clause when using Index Join: 20,000

  AQuADataExport

  AQuA API export is designed to export all the records for all the objects ( tables ). AQuA query jobs have the following limitations:

  Limitations
  • If a query in an AQuA job is executed longer than 8 hours, this job will be killed automatically.
  • The killed AQuA job can be retried three times before returned as failed.
• 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 Zuora data, such as BillingState.
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 Invoices WHERE BillingState = '"&B5&"'","OAuthClientID="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";Tenant="&B3&";ZuoraService="&B4&";Provider=Zuora",B6)
3. Change the filter to change the data.