LINQ to Salesforce Marketing 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 Salesforce Marketing Data Provider.

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

    Authenticating to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

    Set the User and Password to your login credentials, or to the credentials for a sandbox user if you are connecting to a sandbox account.

    Connecting to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

    By default, the data provider connects to production environments. Set UseSandbox to true to use a Salesforce Marketing Cloud sandbox account.

    The default Instance is s7 of the Web Services API; however, if you use a different instance, you can set Instance.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    User=myUser;Password=myPassword;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting SFMarketingCloudEntities 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:

SFMarketingCloudEntities context = new SFMarketingCloudEntities(); var subscriberQuery = from subscriber in context.Subscriber select subscriber; foreach (var result in subscriberQuery) { 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.

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