LINQ to Greenhouse Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You need an API key to connect to Greenhouse. To create an API key, follow the steps below:

   1. Click the Configure icon in the navigation bar and locate Dev Center on the left.
   2. Select API Credential Management.
   3. Click Create New API Key.
   • Set "API Type" to Harvest.
   • Set "Partner" to custom.
   • Optionally, provide a description.
   4. Proceed to Manage permissions and select the appropriate permissions based on the resources you want to access through the driver.
   5. Copy the created key and set APIKey to that value.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   APIKey=YourAPIKey;

👁 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 GreenhouseEntities 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:

GreenhouseEntities context = new GreenhouseEntities();

var applicationsQuery = from applications in context.Applications
 select applications;

foreach (var result in applicationsQuery) {
 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.