LINQ to Microsoft Project Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid Microsoft Project user credentials. In addition, specify a URL to a valid Microsoft Project server organization root or Microsoft Project services file.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   User=myuseraccount;Password=mypassword;URL=http://myserver/myOrgRoot;

👁 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 MicrosoftProjectEntities 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:

MicrosoftProjectEntities context = new MicrosoftProjectEntities();

var projectsQuery = from projects in context.Projects
 select projects;

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

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