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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/sasxpt-ado-linqtoef.rst

⇱ LINQ to SAS xpt Data

LINQ to SAS xpt Data

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the SAS xpt Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Connecting to Local SASXpt Files

    You can connect to local SASXpt file by setting the URI to a folder containing SASXpt files.

    Connecting to S3 data source

    You can connect to Amazon S3 source to read SASXpt files. Set the following properties to connect:

    • URI: Set this to the folder within your bucket that you would like to connect to.
    • AWSAccessKey: Set this to your AWS account access key.
    • AWSSecretKey: Set this to your AWS account secret key.
    • TemporaryLocalFolder: Set this to the path, or URI, to the folder that is used to temporarily download SASXpt file(s).

    Connecting to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

    You can connect to ADLS Gen2 to read SASXpt files. Set the following properties to connect:

    • URI: Set this to the name of the file system and the name of the folder which contacts your SASXpt files.
    • AzureAccount: Set this to the name of the Azure Data Lake storage account.
    • AzureAccessKey: Set this to our Azure DataLakeStore Gen 2 storage account access key.
    • TemporaryLocalFolder: Set this to the path, or URI, to the folder that is used to temporarily download SASXpt file(s).

    Below is a typical connection string:

    URI=C:/folder;
    5. 👁 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 SASXptEntities 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.
👁 The available tables in the underlying data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select commands. For example: 

SASXptEntities context = new SASXptEntities();

var sampletable_1Query = from sampletable_1 in context.SampleTable_1
 select sampletable_1;

foreach (var result in sampletable_1Query) {
 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.