LINQ to TaxJar Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   To authenticate to the TaxJar API, first obtain the API Key from the TaxJar UI.

   NOTE: the API is available only for Professional and Premium TaxJar plans.

   If you already have a Professional or Premium plan you can find the API Key by logging in the TaxJar UI and navigating to Account -> TaxJar API. After obtaining the API Key, you can set it in the APIKey connection property.

   Additional Notes

   • By default, the CData connector will retrieve data of the last 3 months in cases where the entity support date range filtering. You can set StartDate to specify the minimum creation date of the data retrieved.
   • If the API Key has been created for a sandbox API account please set UseSandbox to true, but not all endpoints will work as expected. For more information, refer to the TaxJar developer documentation.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   APIKey=3bb04218ef8t80efdf1739abf7257144;

👁 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 TaxJarEntities 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:

TaxJarEntities context = new TaxJarEntities();

var ordersQuery = from orders in context.Orders
 select orders;

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

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