Excel Spreadsheet Automation on ScrapingBee Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Using API Key Authentication

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

  1. Sign in to your ScrapingBee account at https://app.scrapingbee.com
  2. Navigate to the Dashboard and locate your API key in the top section.
  3. Copy the API key for use in the connection string.

  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 ScrapingBee API key.

  Example Connection String

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

  Connecting to ScrapingBee

  Once the authentication is configured, you can connect to ScrapingBee and query data from any of the available tables. All tables require at least one input parameter (such as a search query or product ID) to retrieve data.

• 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 ScrapingBee data, such as SearchQuery.
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 GoogleSearchResults WHERE SearchQuery = '"&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.)