Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Cvent Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as CventConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Cvent data, separated by semicolons.

  Before you can authenticate to Cvent, you must create a workspace and an OAuth application.

  Creating a Workspace

  To create a workspace:

  1. Sign into Cvent and navigate to App Switcher (the blue button in the upper right corner of the page) >> Admin.
  2. In the Admin menu, navigate to Integrations >> REST API.
  3. A new tab launches for Developer Management. Click on Manage API Access in the new tab.
  4. Create a Workspace and name it. Select the scopes you would like your developers to have access to. Scopes control what data domains the developer can access.
     • Choose All to allow developers to choose any scope, and any future scopes added to the REST API.
     • Choose Custom to limit the scopes developers can choose for their OAuth apps to selected scopes. To access all tables exposed by the driver, you need to set the following scopes:

       event/attendees:read	event/attendees:write	event/contacts:read
       event/contacts:write	event/custom-fields:read	event/custom-fields:write
       event/events:read	event/events:write	event/sessions:delete
       event/sessions:read	event/sessions:write	event/speakers:delete
       event/speakers:read	event/speakers:write	budget/budget-items:read
       budget/budget-items:write	exhibitor/exhibitors:read	exhibitor/exhibitors:write
       survey/surveys:read	survey/surveys:write

  Creating an OAuth Application

  After you have set up a Workspace and invited them, developers can sign up and create a custom OAuth app. See the Creating a Custom OAuth Application section in the Help documentation for more information.

  Connecting to Cvent

  After creating an OAuth application, set the following connection properties to connect to Cvent:

  • InitiateOAuth: GETANDREFRESH. Used to automatically get and refresh the OAuthAccessToken.
  • OAuthClientId: The Client ID associated with the OAuth application. You can find this on the Applications page in the Cvent Developer Portal.
  • OAuthClientSecret: The Client secret associated with the OAuth application. You can find this on the Applications page in the Cvent Developer Portal.
• 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 Cvent data, such as Virtual.
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 Events WHERE Virtual = '"&B4&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";InitiateOAuth="&B3&";Provider=Cvent",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.)