LINQ to ShipStation Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Use the BASIC Authentication standard to connect.

   1. Login to your ShipStation account
   2. Click on the settings icon in the upper right corner. A column menu will show up on the left
   3. Click Account -> API Settings
   4. On the API Settings page, note the API Key and API Secret.

   Authenticating to ShipStation

   • APIKey: Set this to the API key from the API settings page.
   • APISecret: Set this to the Secret key from the API settings page.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   APIKey='YourAPIKey';APISecret='YourAPISecret'

👁 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 ShipStationEntities 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:

ShipStationEntities context = new ShipStationEntities();

var tagsQuery = from tags in context.Tags
 select tags;

foreach (var result in tagsQuery) {
 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.