Working with Dynamics 365 Business Central Data in LINQPad

The CData ADO.NET Provider for Dynamics 365 Business Central enables you to use standard ADO.NET interfaces like LINQ and the Entity Framework to work with Dynamics 365 Business Central data. This article will demonstrate the process of establishing a connection from LINQPad and executing LINQ queries.

Create the Data Model

After downloading and installing both the provider and LINQPad, create a new class library project within Visual Studio.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. Right-click your project and click Add -> New Item -> ADO.NET Entity Data Model. In the resulting dialog, select Code First from database. Click New Connection and specify the connection string options in the resulting wizard.

   To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must provide the User and AccessKey properties.

   To obtain the User and AccessKey values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the User and AccessKey connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.

   To connect to data, specify OrganizationUrl. If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the Company to indicate which company you would like to connect to. Company does not need to be specified if you have only one company.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OrganizationUrl=https://myaccount.financials.dynamics.com/;

2. Select the desired tables and views and click Finish to create the data model.

3. Build the project. The generated files can be used to create the Dynamics 365 Business Central connection in LINQPad.

Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central Data in LINQPad

After you have obtained the required connection properties and created the data model assembly, follow the steps below to start using the data model in LINQPad.

1. Open LINQPad and click Add Connection.

2. Select the "Use a typed data context from your own assembly" option.

3. Select Entity Framework DbContext.

4. Click Browse next to the Path to Custom Assembly box and browse to your project folder. Browse to the .dll or .exe under the bin folder.

5. Select the name of the DbContext.
6. If you saved your connection string in App.Config, specify the path to the App.config.

You can now query Dynamics 365 Business Central data through LINQPad. For examples of the supported LINQ queries, see the "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation.