LINQ to Square Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Square uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, register an app with Square to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

   Additionally, you must specify the LocationId. You can retrieve the Ids for your Locations by querying the Locations table. Alternatively, you can set the LocationId in the search criteria of your query.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OAuthClientId=MyAppId;OAuthClientSecret=MyAppSecret;CallbackURL=http://localhost:33333;LocationId=MyDefaultLocation;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 SquareEntities 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:

SquareEntities context = new SquareEntities();

var refundsQuery = from refunds in context.Refunds
 select refunds;

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

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