LINQ to Exact Online Data

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Exact Online via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Exact Online. 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 Exact Online Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Exact Online uses the OAuth authentication standard. The InitiateOAuth connection property facilitates the OAuth flow -- by default, this is set to GETANDREFRESH. You can also use the embedded OAuth credentials or you can register an OAuth app with Exact to obtain your own. In addition to the OAuth values, provide the Region. If Division is not set, the default Division is determined.

   See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for more information.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Region='United States';Division=5512;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;

👁 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 ExactOnlineEntities 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:

ExactOnlineEntities context = new ExactOnlineEntities();

var accountsQuery = from accounts in context.Accounts
 select accounts;

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

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