Creating Your Own CFA Data Downloads Outside Of Excel

How to download from 3rd party Applications into the simple data format of CFA

CFA stores its data in plain text files. That means that you can create your own data files for use within Excel, using CFA, for example:

Download from an Access database
Extract from an accounting system
Dump from a Visual Basic program

To download the data from another application, you will need to do a bit of programming, probably using VBA or similar.
The format of the data file you need to create is as follows. Make sure you look at a typical data file created by CFA to check you have the format right.

The Header

The data file is divided into sections. The first section is the [HEADER]. In this section you need all the overall details of the data being downloaded:




[HEADER]


Date=20030529202456


User=JohnD311058


DownLoadFileName=c:\cfadata\cfatest05_000008.txt


DownLoadProgram=cfa.XLA


DownLoadProgramVersion=1.050


DownLoadName= 


OrganisationName=Business Functions Ltd


ApplicationName=Microsoft Excel


ApplicationVersion=10


Prefix=MYPREF

Notes

The prefix will be assigned to the front of EVERY range name.
Most of the details here are only used by the log file (used by the Data Manager).

Ranges

Next are the various ranges in the data file, in the section entitled [RANGES]. For example:




[RANGES]


T_GLOBAL	8	1	20000101	20010101	20020101	20030101	20040101	20050101	20060101	20070101


[SHEET] Sheet4


V_RANGE2D	12	3	2.0000	2.0000	2.0000	2.0000	2.0000			2.0000	2.0000	2.0000	2.0000	2.0000


[SHEET] Sheet3


V_CAP	1	1	67.0000


V_INF	1	1	45.0000


[SHEET] Sheet2


T_TB2	8	1	20000101	20000701	20010101	20010701	20020101	20020701	20030101	20030701


V_FCST	3	1	33.0000	11.0000	22.0000


V_TXT1	1	1	FRED


V_TXT2	2	1	BILL	BEN


X_COSTS2	8	1	400.0000	500.0000						


X_SALES2	8	1	100.0000	200.0000						


[SHEET] Sheet1


X_COSTS	8	1	40.0000	50.0000	1.0000	2.0000	3.0000	4.0000	5.0000	6.0000


X_SALES	8	1	10.0000	20.0000

Notes

Numerical values need to be separated by the TAB character (vbtab in Visual Basic).
The first field is the range name, the second is the SIZE of the range and the third is the SIZE of the y-dimension (frequently 1). Thereafter it is the values that correspond with the times.
The date is always in the format YYYYMMDD.

Ending the Data File

Finally you need the [END] keyword to complete the file:




[END]

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