JSON import to Excel

Since this is VBA, I'd use COM to call xmlhttprequest but use it in synchronous manner as not to upset VBA’s single threaded execution environment, A sample class that illustrates a post and get request in this manner follows:

'BEGIN CLASS syncWebRequestPrivate Const REQUEST_COMPLETE = 4Private m_xmlhttp As ObjectPrivate m_response As StringPrivate Sub Class_Initialize()    Set m_xmlhttp = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")End SubPrivate Sub Class_Terminate()    Set m_xmlhttp = NothingEnd SubProperty Get Response() As String    Response = m_responseEnd PropertyProperty Get Status() As Long    Status = m_xmlhttp.StatusEnd PropertyPublic Sub AjaxPost(Url As String, Optional postData As String = "")    m_xmlhttp.Open "POST", Url, False    m_xmlhttp.setRequestHeader "Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"    m_xmlhttp.setRequestHeader "Content-length", Len(postData)    m_xmlhttp.setRequestHeader "Connection", "close"    m_xmlhttp.send (postData)    If m_xmlhttp.readyState = REQUEST_COMPLETE Then        m_response = m_xmlhttp.responseText    End IfEnd SubPublic Sub AjaxGet(Url As String)    m_xmlhttp.Open "GET", Url, False    m_xmlhttp.setRequestHeader "Connection", "close"    m_xmlhttp.send    If m_xmlhttp.readyState = REQUEST_COMPLETE Then        m_response = m_xmlhttp.responseText    End IfEnd Sub'END CLASS syncWebRequest   

So now you can call the above to return you the server's response:

Dim request As New syncWebRequestrequest.ajaxGet "http://localhost/ClientDB/AllClients?format=json" Dim json as string json = request.Response

The problem here is we want to be able to read the data returned from the server in some way, more so than manipulating the JSON string directly. What's worked for me is using the VBA-JSON (google code export here) COM type Collection to handle JSON arrays and Dictionary to handle members and their declarations, with a parser factory method Parse that basically makes creating these collections of dictionaries much simpler.

So now we can parse the JSON:

[{"Name":"test name","Surname":"test surname","Address":{"Street":"test street","Suburb":"test suburb","City":"test city"}}]

into something like the following:

Set clients = parser.parse(request.Response)For Each client In clients    name = client("Name")    surname = client("Surname")    street = client("Address")("Street")    suburb = client("Address")("Suburb")    city = client("Address")("City")Next

That's nice but what about stuff like being able to edit and post back the data? Well there's also a method toString to create a JSON string from the above [Collection/Dictionary] JSON data, assuming the server accepts JSON back.

I wrote a .NET Excel-Addin for this. It's a generic Excel JSON client that streams any JSON object straight into Excel via http.

Docs and installation instructions can be found here:http://excel-requests.pathio.com/en/master/

And here's the GitHub link:https://github.com/ZoomerAnalytics/excel-requests