LINQ to Avalara AvaTax Data

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Avalara AvaTax via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Avalara AvaTax. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Avalara AvaTax Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The primary method for performing basic authentication is to provide your login credentials, as follows:

   • User: Set this to your username.
   • Password: Set this to your password.

   Optionally, if you are making use of a sandbox environment, set the following:

   • UseSandbox: Set this to true if you are authenticating with a sandbox account.

   Authenticating Using Account Number and License Key

   Alternatively, you can authenticate using your account number and license key. Connect to data using the following:

   • AccountId: Set this to your Account Id. The Account Id is listed in the upper right hand corner of the admin console.
   • LicenseKey: Set this to your Avalara Avatax license key. You can generate a license key by logging into Avalara Avatax as an account administrator and navigating to Settings -> Reset License Key.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   User=MyUser;Password=MyPassword;

👁 Required connection properties for the data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting AvalaraAvataxEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

AvalaraAvataxEntities context = new AvalaraAvataxEntities();

var transactionsQuery = from transactions in context.Transactions
 select transactions;

foreach (var result in transactionsQuery) {
 Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Id);
}

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.