Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Carbone Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Carbone Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Carbone.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Carbone (see below).

  Carbone API Profile Settings

  Carbone uses API key authentication via a Bearer token in the Authorization header. To obtain an API key:

  1. Log in to your Carbone account at https://account.carbone.io
  2. Copy the API key shown on the account home page

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

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your Carbone API key (Bearer token).
  • CarboneVersion: (Optional) The major version of the Carbone API to target via the carbone-version request header. Defaults to 5. Accepted values: 5, 4, 3, staging.
• 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 Carbone 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 Templates WHERE Category = '"&B4&"'","Profile="&B1&";AuthScheme="&B2&";APIKey="&B3&";Provider=API",B5)


3. Change the filter to change the data.