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

⇱ LINQ to Smartsheet Data

LINQ to Smartsheet 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 Smartsheet Data Provider.

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

About Smartsheet Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Smartsheet. Customers use CData connectivity to:

  • Read and write attachments, columns, comments and discussions.
  • View the data in individuals cells, report on cell history, and more.
  • Perform Smartsheet-specific actions like deleting or downloading attachments, creating, copying, deleting, or moving sheets, and moving or copying rows to another sheet.

Users frequently integrate Smartsheet with analytics tools such as Tableau, Crystal Reports, and Excel. Others leverage our tools to replicate Smartsheet data to databases or data warehouses.


Getting Started


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 Smartsheet Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, register an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties.

    However, for testing purposes you can instead use the Personal Access Token you get when you create an application; set this to the OAuthAccessToken connection property.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    OAuthClientId=MyOauthClientId;OAuthClientSecret=MyOAuthClientSecret;CallbackURL=http://localhost:33333;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;
    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 SmartsheetEntities 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 , update, delete, and insert commands. For example: 

SmartsheetEntities context = new SmartsheetEntities();

var sheet_event_plan_budgetQuery = from sheet_event_plan_budget in context.Sheet_Event_Plan_Budget
 select sheet_event_plan_budget;

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

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