OpenCorporate data Excel REST query

I got this idea from Tony Hirst’s great blog. The OpenCorporates API gives rich information many companies. Using Google Refine to reconcile, it cleans up many sources of data to a queryable datasource.

So here is an initially very simple entry for the rest-Excel library that takes a query and populates a worksheet with information on all the companies registered similar to that query. Here’s the first few lines of a query on ‘Google’

I used the rest Explorer to see what data this kind of response this thing returns, and picked a few coumn headings to be populated as above. The library entry is pretty straightforward and looks like this

      With .add("opencorporates reconcile")
            .add "restType", erSingleQuery
            .add "url", "http://opencorporates.com/reconcile?query="
            .add "results", "result"
            .add "treeSearch", True
            .add "ignore", vbNullString
        End With

 

and the code to execute the query looks like this

Public Sub testOpenCorporates()
    generalQuery "opencorporates", "opencorporates reconcile", _
        InputBox(prompt:="Enter your openCorporates search query", _
             Title:="openCorporates API query:results to the opencorporates worksheet")
End Sub

I’ll be returning to this topic in the future as I dig a little more into this API. This is example is in the cDataSet.xlsm workbook and can be downloaded from the ramblings site.