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Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with SAS Data Sets.

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LINQ to SAS Data Sets Data


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 SAS Data Sets Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Set the following connection properties to connect to your SAS DataSet files:

    Connecting to Local Files

    • Set the Connection Type to "Local." Local files support SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE commands.
    • Set the URI to a folder containing SAS files, e.g. C:\PATH\TO\FOLDER\.

    Connecting to Cloud-Hosted SAS DataSet Files

    While the driver is capable of pulling data from SAS DataSet files hosted on a variety of cloud data stores, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE are not supported outside of local files in this driver.

    Set the Connection Type to the service hosting your SAS DataSet files. A unique prefix at the beginning of the URI connection property is used to identify the cloud data store and the remainder of the path is a relative path to the desired folder (one table per file) or single file (a single table). For more information, refer to the Getting Started section of the Help documentation.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    URI=C:/myfolder;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting SASDataSetsEntities 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:

SASDataSetsEntities context = new SASDataSetsEntities(); var restaurantsQuery = from restaurants in context.restaurants select restaurants; foreach (var result in restaurantsQuery) { 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.