Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Placid Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Placid uses API Key authentication to control access to the API. API tokens are project-specific and can be obtained from your project settings on placid.app.

  Using API Key Authentication

  To obtain your API key, log in to placid.app, navigate to your project, open the project settings, and generate an API token from the API section. Note that each API token is scoped to a specific project.

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

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your Placid project API token.

  Example connection string:

  Profile=C:\profiles\Placid.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_project_api_token';
  

• 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 Placid 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 Collections 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.)