LINQ to PayPal Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The provider surfaces tables from two PayPal APIs. The APIs use different authentication methods.

   • The REST API uses the OAuth standard. To authenticate to the REST API, set the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL properties.
   • The Classic API requires Signature API credentials. To authenticate to the Classic API, obtain an API username, password, and signature.

   See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to obtaining the necessary API credentials.

   To select the API you want to work with, you can set the Schema property to REST or SOAP. By default the SOAP schema will be used.

   For testing purposes you can set UseSandbox to true and use sandbox credentials.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Schema=SOAP;Username=sandbox-facilitator_api1.test.com;Password=xyz123;Signature=zx2127;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 PayPalEntities 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:

PayPalEntities context = new PayPalEntities();

var transactionsQuery = from transactions in context.Transactions
 select transactions;

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

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