Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Azure DevOps Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as AzureDevOpsConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Azure DevOps data, separated by semicolons.

  You can connect to your Azure DevOps account by providing the Organization and PersonalAccessToken.

  Obtaining a Personal Access Token

  A PersonalAccessToken is necessary for account authentication.

  To generate one, log in to your Azure DevOps Organization account and navigate to Profile -> Personal Access Tokens -> New Token. The generated token will be displayed.

  If you wish to authenticate to Azure DevOps using OAuth refer to the online Help documentation for an authentication guide.

• 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 Azure DevOps data, such as Reason.
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 Builds WHERE Reason = '"&B6&"'","AuthScheme="&B1&";Organization="&B2&";ProjectId="&B3&";PersonalAccessToken="&B4&";InitiateOAuth="&B5&";Provider=AzureDevOps",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.)