Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Perigon Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Using API Key Authentication

  To use the Perigon API, you need to obtain an API key from your Perigon account. Navigate to the Perigon dashboard and generate an API key from your account settings.

  After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your Perigon API key.

  Example connection string:

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

  Available Tables

  The Perigon profile provides access to the following tables:

  • Articles - News articles retrieved from the Perigon news intelligence API
  • Headlines - Story clusters grouping related headline articles
  • Sources - News sources tracked by the Perigon news intelligence API
  • Journalists - Journalist profiles tracked by the Perigon news intelligence 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 Perigon 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 Articles 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.)