LINQ to Freshdesk Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   FreshDesk makes use of basic authentication. To connect to data, set the following connection properties:

   • Domain: Set this to the domain associated with your FreshDesk account. For example, in your URL: https://my_domain.freshdesk.com.
   • APIKey: Set this to the API key associated with your FreshDesk account. To retrieve your API key, Log into your support Portal -> Click on profile picture in the top right corner -> profile settings page. The API key will be available below the change password section to the right.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Domain=MyDomain;APIKey=myAPIKey;

👁 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 FreshDeskEntities 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:

FreshDeskEntities context = new FreshDeskEntities();

var ticketsQuery = from tickets in context.Tickets
 select tickets;

foreach (var result in ticketsQuery) {
 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.