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LINQ to Workday 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 Workday Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Workday via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Workday. 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 Workday Data Source".
  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect, there are three pieces of information required: Authentication, API URL, and WSDL URL.

    Authentication

    To authenticate, specify your User and Password. Note that you must append your Tenant to your User separated by an '@' character. For instance, if you normally log in with 'geraldg' and your Tenant is 'mycompany_mc1', then your User should be specified as 'geraldg@mycompany_mc1'.

    API URL

    The API URL may be specified either directly via APIURL, or it may be constructed from the Tenant, Service, and Host. The APIURL is constructed in the following format: <Host>/ccx/service/<Tenant>/<Service>.

    WSDL URL

    The WSDLURL may be specified in its entirety, or may be constructed from the Service and WSDLVersion connection properties. The WSDLURL is constructed in the following format: https://community.workday.com/sites/default/files/file-hosting/productionapi/<Service>/<WSDLVersion>/<Service>.wsdl

    Below is a typical connection string:

    User=myuser;Password=mypassword;Tenant=mycompany_gm1;Host=https://wd3-impl-services1.workday.com
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting WorkdayEntities 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:

WorkdayEntities context = new WorkdayEntities(); var workersQuery = from workers in context.Workers select workers; foreach (var result in workersQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Worker_Reference_WID); }

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