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Complete read-write access to Xero accounting 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 to Xero 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 Xero Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect, set the Schema connection property in addition to any authentication values. Xero offers authentication for private applications, public applications, and partner applications. You will need to set the XeroAppAuthentication property to PUBLIC, PRIVATE, or PARTNER, depending on the type of application configured. To connect from a private application, you will additionally need to set the OAuthAccessToken, OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, CertificateStoreType, CertificateStore, and CertificateStorePassword.

    To connect from a public or partner application, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL, or you can register an app to obtain your own OAuth values.

    See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to authenticating to Xero.

  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting XeroEntities 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:

XeroEntities context = new XeroEntities(); var itemsQuery = from items in context.Items select items; foreach (var result in itemsQuery) { 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.