Excel Spreadsheet Automation on SAP ByDesign Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as SAPByDesignConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to SAP ByDesign data, separated by semicolons.

  Set the following connection properties to connect to SAP ByDesign.

  • Url: Set this to the Url of your SAP ByDesign site. For example, https://test.sapbydesign.com
  • User: Set this to the username of your account.
  • Password: Set this to the password of your account.
  • CustomService or AnalyticsService: Only one of these must be specified. If you have a custom service you want to retrieve data from, specify CustomService. If you want to retrieve the reports of a analytical service, specify AnalyticsService.
    If neither is specified, 'cc_home_analytics.svc' will used as a default for the AnalyticsService property. If you are not sure what service to specify, you can always query the Services view to list available services.
• 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 SAP ByDesign data, such as ProductCategoryID.
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 [Inventory Balance] WHERE ProductCategoryID = '"&B5&"'","URL="&B1&";User="&B2&";Password="&B3&";CustomService="&B4&";Provider=SAPByDesign",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.)