LINQ to Zoho Creator Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The connector is already registered with Zoho Creator as an OAuth application.

   If you would prefer to use your own custom OAuth app, see the Help documentation.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   AccountsServer=AccountsServer;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 ZohoCreatorEntities 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:

ZohoCreatorEntities context = new ZohoCreatorEntities();

var leave_typesQuery = from leave_types in context.Leave_Types
 select leave_types;

foreach (var result in leave_typesQuery) {
 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.