LINQ to Zoho Books Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Zoho Books uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, create an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties. See the OAuth section of the Getting Started guide in the Help documentation for an authentication guide.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OAuthClientId=MyOAuthClientId;OAuthClientSecret=myOAuthClientSecret;CallbackURL=https://localhost:33333;OrganizationId=MyOrganizationId;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 ZohoBooksEntities 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:

ZohoBooksEntities context = new ZohoBooksEntities();

var invoicesQuery = from invoices in context.INVOICES
 select invoices;

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

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