Access Live JSON Services in Excel (Desktop) via Connect AI

Microsoft Excel is a widely used spreadsheet software application, primarily used for tasks related to data management, analysis, and visualization. When combined with CData Connect AI, you gain immediate access to JSON services directly within Excel, facilitating data analysis, collaboration, calculations, and more.This article shows how to connect to JSON in your Connect AI instance and access and update live JSON services in Excel spreadsheets.

CData Connect AI provides a pure cloud-to-cloud interface for JSON, allowing you to easily access live JSON services in Excel for the web. Simply use the Connect AI Add-In to query live data (or write your own). Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect AI pushes all supported query operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to JSON, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return JSON services.

Configure JSON Connectivity for Excel

Connectivity to JSON from Excel is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with JSON services from Excel, we start by creating and configuring a JSON connection.

1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection

2. Select "JSON" from the Add Connection panel

3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to JSON.

   See the Getting Started chapter in the data provider documentation to authenticate to your data source: The data provider models JSON APIs as bidirectional database tables and JSON files as read-only views (local files, files stored on popular cloud services, and FTP servers). The major authentication schemes are supported, including HTTP Basic, Digest, NTLM, OAuth, and FTP. See the Getting Started chapter in the data provider documentation for authentication guides.

   After setting the URI and providing any authentication values, set DataModel to more closely match the data representation to the structure of your data.

   The DataModel property is the controlling property over how your data is represented into tables and toggles the following basic configurations.

   • Document (default): Model a top-level, document view of your JSON data. The data provider returns nested elements as aggregates of data.
   • FlattenedDocuments: Implicitly join nested documents and their parents into a single table.
   • Relational: Return individual, related tables from hierarchical data. The tables contain a primary key and a foreign key that links to the parent document.

   See the Modeling JSON Data chapter for more information on configuring the relational representation. You will also find the sample data used in the following examples. The data includes entries for people, the cars they own, and various maintenance services performed on those cars.

   
4. Click Save & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add JSON Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to JSON services from Excel.

Access Live JSON Services in Excel

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect AI from Excel to access live JSON services.

1. Open Excel, create a new sheet (or open an existing one).
2. Click Insert and click Get Add-ins. (if you have already installed the Add-In, jump to step 4).
3. Search for CData Connect AI Add-In and install the Add-in.
4. Click Data and open the CData Connect AI Add-In.
5. In the Add-In panel, click Authorize to authenticate with your CData Connect AI instance
6. In the CData Connect AI panel in Excel, click Import
7. Choose a Connection (e.g. JSON1), Table (e.g. people), and Columns to import
8. Optionally add Filters, Sorting, and a Limit
9. Click Execute to import the data

Update JSON Services from Excel

In addition to viewing JSON services in Excel, CData Connect AI also lets you update and delete JSON services. Begin by importing data (as described above).

1. Update any cell or cells with changes you want to push to JSON (your changes will be in red)
2. In the CData Connect AI Add-In panel, select Update
3. Optionally highlight the cell(s) you wish to update and select an update option ("Update All" or "Update Selected")
4. Click Execute to push the updates to JSON, and a notification will appear when the update is complete

Live Access to JSON Services from Cloud Applications

Now, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live JSON services from your Excel workbook. You can add more data to your workbook for calculations, aggregations, collaboration, and more.



Try CData Connect AI and get real-time data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications.