Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for MongoDB provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete MongoDB data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search MongoDB data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

Getting Started

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The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following: =CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the MongoDB data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as MongoDBConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to MongoDB data, separated by semicolons.

  Set the Server, Database, User, and Password connection properties to connect to MongoDB. To access MongoDB collections as tables you can use automatic schema discovery or write your own schema definitions. Schemas are defined in .rsd files, which have a simple format. You can also execute free-form queries that are not tied to the schema.

• 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 MongoDB 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 restaurants WHERE Name = '"&B6&"'","Server="&B1&";Port="&B2&";Database="&B3&";User="&B4&";Password="&B5&";Provider=MongoDB",B7)
3. Change the filter to change the data.