Automate Shortcut Integration Tasks from PowerShell

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Are you in search of a quick and easy way to access Shortcut data from PowerShell? This article demonstrates how to utilize the Shortcut Cmdlets for tasks like connecting to Shortcut data, automating operations, downloading data, and more.

The CData API Driver for ADO.NET is a standard ADO.NET Provider that make it easy to accomplish data cleansing, normalization, backup, and other integration tasks by enabling real-time access to Shortcut.

ADO.NET Provider

The ADO.NET Provider provides a SQL interface for Shortcut; this tutorial shows how to use the Provider to retrieve Shortcut data.

Once you have acquired the necessary connection properties, accessing Shortcut data in PowerShell can be enabled in three steps.

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

Shortcut API Profile Settings

Log into your Shortcut account, navigate to Settings > API Tokens, and click Generate Token.

  1. Load the provider's assembly:

    [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile("C:\Program Files\CData\CData API Driver for ADO.NET\lib\System.Data.CData.API.dll")
        
  2. Connect to Shortcut:

     
    $conn= New-Object System.Data.CData.API.APIConnection("Profile=C:\profiles\Shortcut.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';")
    $conn.Open()
    
  3. Instantiate the APIDataAdapter, execute an SQL query, and output the results:

    $sql="SELECT Id, Name from Categories"
    
    $da= New-Object System.Data.CData.API.APIDataAdapter($sql, $conn)
    $dt= New-Object System.Data.DataTable
    $da.Fill($dt)
    
    $dt.Rows | foreach {
    	Write-Host $_.id $_.name
    }
      

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Shortcut with the API Driver

Connect to Shortcut