Excel Spreadsheet Automation on ZohoPeople Data with the QUERY Formula
The CData Excel Add-In for ZohoPeople provides formulas that can query ZohoPeople data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search ZohoPeople 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 ZohoPeople 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 ZohoPeople data, separated by semicolons.
Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the ZohoPeople Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\ZohoPeople.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for ZohoPeople (see below).
ZohoPeople API Profile Settings
Register an OAuth application in the Zoho Developer Console as a server-based application to obtain your Client ID and Client Secret.
- 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.
- 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 ZohoPeople data, such as Country.
- 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.
- Change the filter to change the data.
=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Clients WHERE Country = '"&B6&"'","Profile="&B1&";Authscheme="&B2&";OAuthClientId="&B3&";OAuthClientSecret="&B4&";CallbackUrl="&B5&";Provider=API",B7)
