LINQ to ServiceNow Data

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

Getting Started

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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 ServiceNow Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   ServiceNow uses the OAuth 2.0 authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, register an OAuth app with ServiceNow to obtain the OAuthClientId and OAuthClientSecret connection properties. In addition to the OAuth values, specify the Instance, Username, and Password connection properties.

   See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide on connecting to ServiceNow.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OAuthClientId=MyOAuthClientId;OAuthClientSecret=MyOAuthClientSecret;Username=MyUsername;Password=MyPassword;URL=https://myinstance12345.service-now-com;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 ServiceNowEntities 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:

ServiceNowEntities context = new ServiceNowEntities();

var incidentQuery = from incident in context.incident
 select incident;

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

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