LINQ to Power BI XMLA Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   By default, use Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) to connect to Microsoft Power BI XMLA. Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) is Microsoft's multi-tenant, cloud-based directory and identity management service. It is user-based authentication that requires that you set AuthScheme to EntraID (formerly AzureAD).

   For more information on other authentication schemes, refer to the Help documentation.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   AuthScheme=EntraID;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 PowerBIXMLAEntities 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:

PowerBIXMLAEntities context = new PowerBIXMLAEntities();

var customerQuery = from customer in context.Customer
 select customer;

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

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