What is Odata?
Data (Open Data Protocol) is an OASIS standard that defines the best practice for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic with the ability to create reports and dashboards specific to your company.
To gain the maximum benefit of using this function, you will need to be an experienced user of Excel and know how to extract and manipulate the data.
What is a Data Source?
A data source is simply the source of the data. In this case, the data source is the Buildlogic data which is providing information to be pushed out into Excel via Odata to allow manipulation of that data. Buildlogic development will need to build the Data Sources required for extraction.
Access to Odata
If you have been given access to Odata by your Buildlogic Client Administrator, you will need to go to your initials, top right once you have signed into Buildlogic and select Manage User Details.
There will be a token displayed and you will need this token to access the data source(s) that you have access too. For example, if you don’t have access to the Buildlogic Purchases module you will not see any data sources for that module.
Use the small icon at the end of the token information to paste a copy of your token to the clipboard. You will then need to add your token number to the URL below. Make sure the brackets are removed.
Using Odata
To access the data via Odata, please follow the steps below.
Open a blank Excel workbook.
Go to Data -> Get Data and a dropdown as show below will appear where you can select From Other Sources/From Odata Feed
You will then be presented with a screen where you can put in your full URL including your token.
https://odata.buildlogic.com.au/data?token=[tokennumber]
On Selecting the Ok button, a screen similar to the following will be displayed which shows the data sources you have access too based on your user permissions in Buildlogic.
Highlight the data source you want to download and the data will be displayed on the right.
Note: You only will see data relating to the modules you have access too. For example, if you don’t have access to the Buildlogic Purchases module you will not see any data sources for that module.
Select the Transform Data button and the importing will be dropped into Excel.
Once the data is in Excel, you can use this data to produce different outputs from the same data source.
Refreshing data
Once you have the data in Excel, this data can be refreshed from the data source at any time by using Alt+F5.