Excel Spreadsheet Automation on CircleCI Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Using API Key Authentication

  CircleCI uses personal API tokens to authenticate API requests. To generate a personal API token, log in to your CircleCI account, navigate to User Settings > Personal API Tokens, and click Create New Token. Copy the token value immediately as it is only shown once.

  After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your CircleCI personal API token.

  Example connection string:

  Profile=C:\profiles\CircleCI.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_api_token';
  

• 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 CircleCI data, such as ProjectSlug.
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 Artifacts WHERE ProjectSlug = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";AuthScheme="&B2&";ProfileSettings="&B3&";Provider=API",B6)


3. Change the filter to change the data.