Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Front Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as APIConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Front data, separated by semicolons.

  Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Front Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Front.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Front (see below).

  Front API Profile Settings

  Generate an API key in Front by navigating to Settings > Plugins & API > API.

• 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 Front data, such as Type.
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 Channels WHERE Type = '"&B4&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";Provider=API",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.)