Excel Spreadsheet Automation on PDFMonkey Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for PDFMonkey provides formulas that can query PDFMonkey data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search PDFMonkey 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 PDFMonkey 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 PDFMonkey data, separated by semicolons.

  Using API Key Authentication

  PdfMonkey uses API key authentication. To obtain an API key:

  1. Log in to your PdfMonkey account at https://app.pdfmonkey.io
  2. Navigate to your account settings
  3. Open the API Key page
  4. Copy your API key

  After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:
  • APIKey: Set this to your PdfMonkey API key.

  Example Connection String

  Profile=C:\profiles\PdfMonkey.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings="APIKey=your_api_key"
  

  Connecting to PdfMonkey

  Once the authentication is configured, you can connect to PdfMonkey and query data from any of the available tables such as CurrentUser, DocumentCards, Documents, DocumentTemplateCards, and DocumentTemplates.

• 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 PDFMonkey data, such as .
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 CurrentUser WHERE = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";AuthScheme="&B2&";ProfileSettings="&B3&";Provider=API",B6)

👁 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.)