LINQ to SageHR Data

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the SageHR Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the SageHR via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for SageHR. 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 SageHR Data Source".
  4. Enter your data source connection information.

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

    SageHR API Profile Settings

    Navigate to Settings > Integrations > API in your SageHR account and click Enable API Access to obtain your API key. Your Subdomain is the prefix of your SageHR URL.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\SageHR.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;Subdomain=your_subdomain';
  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 applicantactionsQuery = from applicantactions in context.ApplicantActions
  select applicantactions;

foreach (var result in applicantactionsQuery) {
  Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.ApplicantId);
}

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

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