Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as DocuSignConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to DocuSign data, separated by semicolons.

  To connect to DocuSign, set the following connection properties:

  • UseSandbox: indicates whether current user account is sandbox or not (FALSE by default)
  • AccountId (optional): set it in the connection string if you have access to multiple Account Ids

  Authenticating to DocuSign

  DocuSign uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to create an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties. See the Help documentation more information.

• 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 DocuSign data, such as DocumentName.
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 Documents WHERE DocumentName = '"&B4&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";CallbackURL="&B3&";Provider=DocuSign",B5)
3. Change the filter to change the data.