Working with WooCommerce Data in LINQPad

The CData ADO.NET Provider for WooCommerce enables you to use standard ADO.NET interfaces like LINQ and the Entity Framework to work with WooCommerce data. This article will demonstrate the process of establishing a connection from LINQPad and executing LINQ queries.

Create the Data Model

After downloading and installing both the provider and LINQPad, create a new class library project within Visual Studio.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. Right-click your project and click Add -> New Item -> ADO.NET Entity Data Model. In the resulting dialog, select Code First from database. Click New Connection and specify the connection string options in the resulting wizard.

   WooCommerce supports the following authentication methods: one-legged OAuth1.0 Authentication and standard OAuth2.0 Authentication.

   Connecting using one-legged OAuth 1.0 Authentication

   Specify the following properties (NOTE: the below credentials are generated from WooCommerce settings page and should not be confused with the credentials generated by using WordPress OAuth2.0 plugin):

   • ConsumerKey
   • ConsumerSecret

   Connecting using WordPress OAuth 2.0 Authentication

   After having configured the plugin, you may connect to WooCommerce by providing the following connection properties:

   • OAuthClientId
   • OAuthClientSecret
   • CallbackURL
   • InitiateOAuth - Set this to either GETANDREFRESH or REFRESH

   In either case, you will need to set the Url property to the URL of the WooCommerce instance.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Url=https://example.com/; ConsumerKey=ck_ec52c76185c088ecaa3145287c8acba55a6f59ad; ConsumerSecret=cs_9fde14bf57126156701a7563fc87575713c355e5;

2. Select the desired tables and views and click Finish to create the data model.

3. Build the project. The generated files can be used to create the WooCommerce connection in LINQPad.

Connect to WooCommerce Data in LINQPad

After you have obtained the required connection properties and created the data model assembly, follow the steps below to start using the data model in LINQPad.

1. Open LINQPad and click Add Connection.

2. Select the "Use a typed data context from your own assembly" option.

3. Select Entity Framework DbContext.

4. Click Browse next to the Path to Custom Assembly box and browse to your project folder. Browse to the .dll or .exe under the bin folder.

5. Select the name of the DbContext.
6. If you saved your connection string in App.Config, specify the path to the App.config.

You can now query WooCommerce data through LINQPad. For examples of the supported LINQ queries, see the "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation.