LINQ to Zoho Inventory Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   In order to connect to Zoho Inventory, set the following connection properties:

   • OrganizationId: set this to the ID associated with your specific Zoho Inventory organization
   • InitiateOAuth: set the to "GETANDREFRESH"
   • AccountsServer (Optional): set this full Account Server URL (only when manually refreshing the OAuth token)

   The connectors use OAuth to authenticate with Zoho Inventory. For more information, refer to the Getting Started section of the Help documentation.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OrganizationId=YourOrganizationId;AccountsServer=YourAccountServerURL;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 ZohoInventoryEntities 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:

ZohoInventoryEntities context = new ZohoInventoryEntities();

var contactsQuery = from contacts in context.Contacts
 select contacts;

foreach (var result in contactsQuery) {
 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.