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LINQ to Act CRM Data

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Act CRM ADO.NET Provider

Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with Act CRM data including Companies, Contact, Groups, Opportunities, and more!

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LINQ provides general-purpose query facilities in .NET Framework 3.0 and above and provides one easy way to programmatically access data through from CData ADO.NET Data Providers. This example uses LINQ to access information from the Act CRM Data Provider.

This article demonstrates how to use LINQ to access Act CRM tables through the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Act CRM. To do this you will LINQ to Entity Framework, which is used to generate the connection and can be used with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data via 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 Act CRM Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid Act! user credentials. In addition to the authentication values, see the following:

    • Connecting to Act! Premium

      In addition to the authentication values, the URL to Act! is also required; for example https://eup1-iis-04.eu.hosted.act.com/.

      Additionally, you must specify the ActDatabase you will connect to. This is found by going to the About Act! Premium menu of your account, at the top right of the page, in the ? menu. Use the Database Name in the window that appears.

    • Connecting to Act! Premium Cloud

      To connect to your Act! Premium Cloud account, you also need to specify the ActCloudName property. This property is found in the URL address of the Cloud account; for example https://eup1-iis-04.eu.hosted.act.com/ActCloudName/.

    Note that retrieving ActCRM metadata can be expensive. It is advised that you set the CacheMetadata property to store the metadata locally.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    URL=https://myActCRMserver.com;User=myUser;Password=myPassword;ActDatabase=MyDB;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting ActCRMEntities 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:

ActCRMEntities context = new ActCRMEntities(); var activitiesQuery = from activities in context.Activities select activities; foreach (var result in activitiesQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.ActivityDisplayName); }

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