LINQ to FormSite Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the FormSite Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\FormSite.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for FormSite (see below).

   FormSite API Profile Settings

   Log into your Formsite account and visit the Admin Portal to generate or retrieve your API key. Your

   ServerNumber

   is the numeric part of your server URL and

   UserDirectory

   is your account's directory path.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\FormSite.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;ServerNumber=your_server_number;UserDirectory=your_user_directory';

👁 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 APIEntities 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 commands. For example:

APIEntities context = new APIEntities();

var formitemsQuery = from formitems in context.FormItems
 select formitems;

foreach (var result in formitemsQuery) {
 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.