Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Dynamics 365 Business Central provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Dynamics 365 Business Central data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Dynamics 365 Business Central 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 Dynamics 365 Business Central data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as D365BusinessCentralConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Dynamics 365 Business Central data, separated by semicolons.

  To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must provide the User and AccessKey properties.

  To obtain the User and AccessKey values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the User and AccessKey connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.

  To connect to data, specify OrganizationUrl. If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the Company to indicate which company you would like to connect to. Company does not need to be specified if you have only one company.

• 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 Dynamics 365 Business Central data, such as Name.
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 Accounts WHERE Name = '"&B2&"'","OrganizationUrl="&B1&";Provider=D365BusinessCentral",B3)
3. Change the filter to change the data.