LINQ to Planio Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Planio Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Planio.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Planio (see below).

   Planio API Profile Settings

   Enable the REST API in Planio Administration Settings, then go to My Account > API Access Key and click Show to reveal your API key. Your subdomain is the prefix of your Planio account URL.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Planio.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;Subdomain=your_subdomain';

👁 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 APIEntities 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:

APIEntities context = new APIEntities();

var companiesQuery = from companies in context.Companies
 select companies;

foreach (var result in companiesQuery) {
 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.