LINQ to IBM Informix Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Set the following properties to connect to IBM Informix

   • Server: Set this to the name of the server running IBM Informix.
   • Port: Set this to the port the IBM Informix server is listening on.
   • Database: Set this to the name of the IBM Informix database.
   • User: Set this to the username of a user allowed to access the database.
   • Password: Set this to the password of a user allowed to access the database.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Server=10.0.1.2;Port=50000;User=admin;Password=admin;Database=test;

👁 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 InformixEntities 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:

InformixEntities context = new InformixEntities();

var booksQuery = from books in context.Books
 select books;

foreach (var result in booksQuery) {
 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.