LINQ to QuickBooks Time Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   TSheets uses the OAuth2 standard for authentication and authorization. To construct your own OAuth app and connect to data, refer to OAuth section in the Help.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OAuthClientId=myclientid;OAuthClientSecret=myclientsecret;CallbackUrl=http://localhost:33333;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 TSheetsEntities 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:

TSheetsEntities context = new TSheetsEntities();

var timesheetsQuery = from timesheets in context.Timesheets
 select timesheets;

foreach (var result in timesheetsQuery) {
 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.