LINQ to SAS xpt Data

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SASxpt ADO.NET Provider

Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with SAS xpt (XPORT) files data.

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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 SAS xpt Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Connecting to Local SASXpt Files

    You can connect to local SASXpt file by setting the URI to a folder containing SASXpt files.

    Connecting to S3 data source

    You can connect to Amazon S3 source to read SASXpt files. Set the following properties to connect:

    • URI: Set this to the folder within your bucket that you would like to connect to.
    • AWSAccessKey: Set this to your AWS account access key.
    • AWSSecretKey: Set this to your AWS account secret key.
    • TemporaryLocalFolder: Set this to the path, or URI, to the folder that is used to temporarily download SASXpt file(s).

    Connecting to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

    You can connect to ADLS Gen2 to read SASXpt files. Set the following properties to connect:

    • URI: Set this to the name of the file system and the name of the folder which contacts your SASXpt files.
    • AzureAccount: Set this to the name of the Azure Data Lake storage account.
    • AzureAccessKey: Set this to our Azure DataLakeStore Gen 2 storage account access key.
    • TemporaryLocalFolder: Set this to the path, or URI, to the folder that is used to temporarily download SASXpt file(s).

    Below is a typical connection string:

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

SASXptEntities context = new SASXptEntities(); var sampletable_1Query = from sampletable_1 in context.SampleTable_1 select sampletable_1; foreach (var result in sampletable_1Query) { 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.