Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Scrapfly Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  The Scrapfly API uses API Key authentication. The API key is passed as the key query parameter on every request.

  Using API Key Authentication

  Your Scrapfly API key is required to create a connection. To obtain your API key:

  1. Log into your Scrapfly account at scrapfly.io.
  2. Navigate to Dashboard and select API Keys.
  3. Copy your API key (begins with scp-live- for production or scp-test- for the test environment).

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

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

  Example connection string:

  Profile=C:\profiles\Scrapfly.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';
  

• 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 Scrapfly 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 Account 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.)