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Connect to live data from Harvest with the API Driver

Connect to Harvest

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LINQ to Harvest 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 Harvest Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Harvest Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Harvest.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Harvest (see below).

    Harvest API Profile Settings

    To authenticate to Harvest, you can use either Token authentication or the OAuth standard. Use Basic authentication to connect to your own data. Use OAuth to allow other users to connect to their data.

    Using Token Authentication

    To use Token Authentication, set the APIKey to your Harvest Personal Access Token in the ProfileSettings connection property. In addition to APIKey, set your AccountId in ProfileSettings to connect.

    Using OAuth Authentication

    First, register an OAuth2 application with Harvest. The application can be created from the "Developers" section of Harvest ID.

    After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

    • ProfileSettings: Set your AccountId in ProfileSettings.
    • AuthScheme: Set this to OAuth.
    • OAuthClientId: Set this to the client ID that you specified in your app settings.
    • OAuthClientSecret: Set this to the client secret that you specified in your app settings.
    • CallbackURL: Set this to the Redirect URI that you specified in your app settings.
    • InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to manage how the driver obtains and refreshes the OAuthAccessToken.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\Harvest.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=my_personal_key;AccountId=_your_account_id';
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting APIEntities 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 commands. For example:

APIEntities context = new APIEntities(); var invoicesQuery = from invoices in context.Invoices select invoices; foreach (var result in invoicesQuery) { 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.