LINQ to BugHerd Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

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

   BugHerd API Profile Settings

   BugHerd uses HTTP Basic authentication with an API key as the username. To obtain an API key:

   1. Sign in to your BugHerd account at https://www.bugherd.com
   2. Navigate to Settings > General Settings
   3. Locate the API Key section and copy the generated key

   After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.

   Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:

   • APIKey: Set this to your BugHerd API key. The driver uses the key as the Basic auth username and sets the password internally to the literal value 'x' as required by BugHerd.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\BugHerd.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';


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 tasksQuery = from tasks in context.Tasks
  select tasks;

foreach (var result in tasksQuery) {
  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.