Learn more
 

Ready to get started?

Download a free trial of the FreshBooks Data Provider to get started:

 Download Now

Learn more:

FreshBooks Icon FreshBooks ADO.NET Provider

Complete read-write access to FreshBooks enables developers to search (Customers, Transactions, Invoices, Sales Receipts, etc.), update items, edit customers, and more, from any .NET application.

In this article

Related articles

LINQ to FreshBooks Data


LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the FreshBooks Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect to FreshBooks, you can set the CompanyName and Token connection properties. Alternatively, you can use the OAuth authentication standard.

    OAuth can be used to enable other users to access their own company data. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to obtain the OAuthClientId and OAuthClientSecret by registering an app. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    CompanyName=CData;Token=token;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting FreshBooksEntities 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:

FreshBooksEntities context = new FreshBooksEntities(); var clientsQuery = from clients in context.Clients select clients; foreach (var result in clientsQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Username); }

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