LINQ to Halo Service Desk Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

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

   HaloServiceDesk API Profile Settings

   HaloServiceDesk uses API key authentication. You can find or create API keys in HaloServiceDesk under Administration > Integrations > Halo API.

   Set the following connection properties to connect:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
   • APIKey: Set this to the API key from your HaloServiceDesk account.
   • Domain: Set this to the hostname of your HaloServiceDesk instance (e.g. yourcompany.haloservicedesk.com).

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\HaloServiceDesk.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;Domain=yourcompany.haloservicedesk.com';


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 assetsQuery = from assets in context.Assets
  select assets;

foreach (var result in assetsQuery) {
  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.