LINQ to Productboard Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Authentication

   To authenticate to ProductBoard, and connect to your own data or to allow other users to connect to their data, you can use API Key authentication.

   Using API Key Authentication

   To authenticate using an API Key, you need to obtain your API Key from your ProductBoard workspace settings.

   You can then connect by setting the AuthScheme to APIKey and providing your API key:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
   • APIKey: Set this to your API key from ProductBoard.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Productboard.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';

👁 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 featuresQuery = from features in context.Features
 select features;

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

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