LINQ to SharePoint Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Set the URL property to the base SharePoint site or to a sub-site. This allows you to query any lists and other SharePoint entities defined for the site or sub-site.

   The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid SharePoint user credentials when using SharePoint On-Premise.

   If you are connecting to SharePoint Online, set the SharePointEdition to SHAREPOINTONLINE along with the User and Password connection string properties. For more details on connecting to SharePoint Online, see the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation

   Below is a typical connection string:

   User=myuseraccount;Password=mypassword;Auth Scheme=NTLM;URL=http://sharepointserver/mysite;SharePointEdition=SharePointOnPremise;

👁 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 SharePointEntities 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:

SharePointEntities context = new SharePointEntities();

var mycustomlistQuery = from mycustomlist in context.MyCustomList
 select mycustomlist;

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

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