Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as ServiceNowConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to ServiceNow data, separated by semicolons.

  ServiceNow uses the OAuth 2.0 authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to register an OAuth app with ServiceNow to obtain the OAuthClientId and OAuthClientSecret connection properties. In addition to the OAuth values, you will need to specify the Instance, Username, and Password connection properties.

  See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide on connecting to ServiceNow.

• 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 ServiceNow data, such as category.
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 incident WHERE category = '"&B6&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";Username="&B3&";Password="&B4&";Instance="&B5&";Provider=ServiceNow",B7)
3. Change the filter to change the data.