Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Adobe Experience Manager Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as AdobeExperienceManagerConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Adobe Experience Manager data, separated by semicolons.

  The driver connects to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) instances that expose the JCR repository over WebDAV. It supports both on-premises AEM and AEM as a Cloud Service deployments.

  To establish a connection, set the following properties:

  • URL: The WebDAV-enabled JCR server URL.
    • AEM as a Cloud Service: https://author-pXXXXX-eXXXXX.adobeaemcloud.com/crx/server
    • Local development: http://localhost:4502/crx/server
  • User: Your AEM username.
  • Password: Your AEM password.

  Note: Tables are dynamically generated based on the JCR repository structure. Ensure that the configured user has sufficient permissions to access the required content paths in the AEM repository.

• 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 Adobe Experience Manager data, such as Name.
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 Content WHERE Name = '"&B4&"'","URL="&B1&";User="&B2&";Password="&B3&";Provider=AdobeExperienceManager",B5)

👁 Formula inputs used in this example. (Google Apps is shown.)

3. Change the filter to change the data. 👁 The outputs of the formula. (Google Apps is shown.)