LINQ to Microsoft Planner Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can connect without setting any connection properties for your user credentials. Below are the minimum connection properties required to connect.

   • InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to avoid repeating the OAuth exchange and manually setting the OAuthAccessToken.
   • Tenant (optional): Set this if you wish to authenticate to a different tenant than your default. This is required to work with an organization not on your default Tenant.

   When you connect the Driver opens the MS Planner OAuth endpoint in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions to the Driver. The Driver then completes the OAuth process.

   1. Extracts the access token from the callback URL and authenticates requests.
   2. Obtains a new access token when the old one expires.
   3. Saves OAuth values in OAuthSettingsLocation to be persisted across connections.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OAuthClientId=MyApplicationId;OAuthClientSecret=MySecretKey;CallbackURL=http://localhost:33333;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 MicrosoftPlannerEntities 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:

MicrosoftPlannerEntities context = new MicrosoftPlannerEntities();

var tasksQuery = from tasks in context.Tasks
 select tasks;

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

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