Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as JiraServiceDeskConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Jira Service Desk data, separated by semicolons.

  You can establish a connection to any Jira Service Desk Cloud account or Server instance.

  Connecting with a Cloud Account

  To connect to a Cloud account, you'll first need to retrieve an APIToken. To generate one, log in to your Atlassian account and navigate to API tokens > Create API token. The generated token will be displayed.

  Supply the following to connect to data:

  • User: Set this to the username of the authenticating user.
  • APIToken: Set this to the API token found previously.

  Connecting with a Service Account

  To authenticate with a service account, you will need to supply the following connection properties:

  • User: Set this to the username of the authenticating user.
  • Password: Set this to the password of the authenticating user.
  • URL: Set this to the URL associated with your JIRA Service Desk endpoint. For example, https://yoursitename.atlassian.net.

  Note: Password has been deprecated for connecting to a Cloud Account and is now used only to connect to a Server Instance.

  Accessing Custom Fields

  By default, the connector only surfaces system fields. To access the custom fields for Issues, set IncludeCustomFields.

• 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 Jira Service Desk data, such as CurrentStatus.
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 Requests WHERE CurrentStatus = '"&B3&"'","ApiKey="&B1&";User="&B2&";Provider=JiraServiceDesk",B4)
3. Change the filter to change the data.