LINQ to Sage Cloud Accounting Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can connect to Sage Business Cloud Accounting using the embedded OAuth connectivity. When you connect, the OAuth endpoint opens in your browser. Log in and grant permissions to complete the OAuth process. See the OAuth section in the online Help documentation for more information on other OAuth authentication flows.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   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 SageBCAccountingEntities 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:

SageBCAccountingEntities context = new SageBCAccountingEntities();

var salesinvoicesQuery = from salesinvoices in context.SalesInvoices
 select salesinvoices;

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

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