Excel Spreadsheet Automation on ADP Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as ADPConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to ADP data, separated by semicolons.

  Connect to ADP by specifying the following properties:

  • OAuthClientId: The client Id of the custom OAuth application you obtained from ADP.
  • OAuthClientSecret: The custom OAuth application's client secret.
  • SSLClientCert: Set this to the certificate provided during registration.
  • SSLClientCertPassword: Set this to the password of the certificate.
  • UseUAT: The connector makes requests to the production environment by default. If using a developer account, set UseUAT = true.
  • RowScanDepth: The maximum number of rows to scan for the custom fields columns available in the table. The default value will be set to 100. Setting a high value may decrease performance.

  The connector uses OAuth to authenticate with ADP. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with ADP using the browser. OAuth access can be configured in ADP through ADP API Central. For more information, refer ADP's API Central Quick Start Guide and the OAuth section in CData's Help documentation.

• 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 ADP data, such as AssociateOID.
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 Workers WHERE AssociateOID = '"&B6&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";SSLClientCert="&B3&";SSLClientCertPassword="&B4&";InitiateOAuth="&B5&";Provider=ADP",B7)

👁 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.)