Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Dynamics 365 Business Central Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Dynamics 365 Business Central provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Dynamics 365 Business Central data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Dynamics 365 Business Central 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 Dynamics 365 Business Central data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as D365BusinessCentralConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Dynamics 365 Business Central data, separated by semicolons.

  To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must select an AuthScheme and provide the required properties (OAuth by default).

  All Methods

  Specify the . If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the to indicate which company you would like to connect to. does not need to be specified if you have only one company.

  Access Key

  To authenticate with an Access Key, set AuthScheme to "AccessKey" and provide the and properties.

  To obtain the and values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the and connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.

  If you wish to authenticate through other methods, refer to the 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 Dynamics 365 Business Central 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 Accounts WHERE Name = '"&B3&"'","OrganizationUrl="&B1&";InitiateOAuth="&B2&";Provider=D365BusinessCentral",B4)

👁 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.)