LINQ to Zoho Projects Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The connector uses OAuth to authenticate with Zoho Projects. CData Software has already registered an OAuth application with Zoho Project which is embedded and used to authenticate.

   If you use the embedded credentials, set the InitiateOAuth connection property to "GETANDREFRESH".

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

   Below is a typical connection string:

   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 ZohoProjectsEntities 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:

ZohoProjectsEntities context = new ZohoProjectsEntities();

var portalsQuery = from portals in context.Portals
 select portals;

foreach (var result in portalsQuery) {
 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.