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LINQ to QuickBooks Data

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QuickBooks ADO.NET Provider

Complete read-write access to QuickBooks enables developers to search (Customers, Transactions, Invoices, Sales Receipts, etc.), update items, edit customers, and more, from any .NET application.

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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 QuickBooks Data Provider.

This article demonstrates how to use LINQ to access QuickBooks tables through the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for QuickBooks. 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 QuickBooks Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    When you are connecting to a local QuickBooks instance, you do not need to set any connection properties.

    Requests are made to QuickBooks through the Remote Connector. The Remote Connector runs on the same machine as QuickBooks and accepts connections through a lightweight, embedded Web server. The server supports SSL/TLS, enabling users to connect securely from remote machines.

    The first time you connect, you will need to authorize the Remote Connector with QuickBooks. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    URL=http://remotehost:8166;User=admin;Password=admin123;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting QuickBooksEntities 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:

QuickBooksEntities context = new QuickBooksEntities(); var customersQuery = from customers in context.Customers select customers; foreach (var result in customersQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Name); }

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