Working with Blackbaud FE NXT Data in LINQPad

The CData ADO.NET Provider for Blackbaud FE NXT enables you to use standard ADO.NET interfaces like LINQ and the Entity Framework to work with Blackbaud FE NXT 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.

   Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to create an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties.

   See the Getting Started guide in the CData driver documentation for more information.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   SubscriptionKey=MySubscriptionKey;

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 Blackbaud FE NXT connection in LINQPad.

Connect to Blackbaud FE NXT 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 Blackbaud FE NXT data through LINQPad. For examples of the supported LINQ queries, see the "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation.