1110 - Using wildcards when linking/importing into Excel or Access

Wildcards can be used when linking or importing into Microsoft Excel or Access, although it may not be possible to use the approach below in all ODBC-enabled applications. For example, assume views end in either "_VW" or "_VIEW" and the goal is to use wildcards to limit the views to just those that contain the characters "_V".

To browse just the tables (or views) ending in "_V", you can call SQLTables, providing a string such as "%_V" as your TableName parameter.

Some arguments in the catalog functions, such as the TableName argument in SQLTables, accept search patterns.

The search pattern characters are:

• An underscore (_), which represents any single character.
• A percent sign (%), which represents any sequence of zero or more characters.
• An escape character, which is driver-specific and is used to include underscores, percent signs, and the escape character as literals.

Examples

Pattern              Description

%A%                All identifiers containing the letter A

ABC_                All four character identifiers starting with ABC

ABC\_               The identifier ABC_, assuming the escape character is a backslash (\)

\\%                   All identifiers starting with backslash (\), assuming the escape char. is backslash

Alternative Approach:

Create an "Alternate Qualifier" in the data source configuration.