Welcome to the CDXZipStream April 2011 Newsletter

You may have heard us discuss previously how CDXZipStream uses custom functions in Microsoft Excel formulas to grab data and place it in worksheet cells.  (If you'd like to hear more about custom functions, check out our blog article on the subject.)  Now we'd like to illustrate how you can go one step further and make the same "data call" using simple programming code, which allows you to apply CDXZipStream functionality across a variety of applications including Microsoft Access, Word, Powerpoint, and Sharepoint.

Let's start with a simple example using the CDXZipStream function CDXZipCode.  This a right-click Excel function takes a zip code and returns a host of associated data for the zip, such city, population, elevation. latitude, longitude, etc.  (The data fields vary depending upon the version you use.) The worksheet custom function formula to get the city for the zip code 07869 would be:

                      = CDXZipCode ("07869", "City")

But we can also do the same thing using just a few lines of visual basic code.  In the first line we use the createobject statement to connect to CDXZipStream:

Set oAdd = CreateObject("CDXZipStreamCF.Connect")

Then simply ask for the data:

City = oAdd.CDXZipCode("07869", "City") 

This code can be generalized to obtain data for a long list of zip codes, and then place the returned data in the desired application. This is exactly the same approach we take in creating CDXZipStream templates.  In future newsletters we'll be reviewing code examples using other CDXZipStream functionality.