.NET Connector for Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Entity Framework Support

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an ADO.NET provider for working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly, ExactTarget) data through the standard ADO.NET or Entity Framework interfaces. It allows you to easily integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud data into your .NET applications, and integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud services with widely used data-oriented technologies.

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the same standard ADO.NET classes as other standard ADO.NET providers: ExactTargetConnection, ExactTargetCommand, ExactTargetDataAdapter, ExactTargetDataReader, ExactTargetParameter, etc. This allows you quickly get started with it and eliminates the need to study any Salesforce Marketing Cloud data access specificities.

Connect Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data With .NET Application Easily

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes it simple to create .NET applications in C#, VB, or other languages, working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud data. It offers standard ADO.NET interface, and thus it's easy to master it. It's powerful design-time editors together with seamless Visual Studio integration allow you to work with Salesforce Marketing Cloud data with less efforts and less code writing. See how easy it is with dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Connecting to Salesforce Marketing Cloud from Server Explorer

To create a Server Explorer connection, you just need to:

Click Connect to Database on the Server Explorer toolbar
Change Data Source to ExactTarget Data Source
Specify the login url to the data source, your Salesforce Marketing Cloud user id and password

That's all, now you can work with Salesforce Marketing Cloud data right in Visual Studio - select data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud entities and edit it.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud connection in Server Explorer

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data Binding

Build your data access layer without writing code manually
Configure dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud components in powerful design-time editors
Bind data grids and other controls to Salesforce Marketing Cloud data just by configuring the smart tags
Work with Salesforce Marketing Cloud data just like with a database

Power of SQL

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to perform SQL queries against your Salesforce Marketing Cloud data. Use SQL statements to work with Salesforce Marketing Cloud accounts, contacts, leads, contracts, products, campaigns opportunities, and other objects.

Our provider offers full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) support and allows you to get Salesforce Marketing Cloud data with SELECT statements and manage data with INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements.

No need to study and use complex Salesforce Marketing Cloud API, just use familiar SQL statements. You may use complex JOINs, WHERE conditions, etc. - all the SQL benefits, not available with Salesforce Marketing Cloud API.

Entity Framework Support

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to access Salesforce Marketing Cloud data via Entity Framework - Microsoft's recommended data access technology. It supports Entity Framework v4, v5, v6, and Entity Framework Core 7.0, and enables you to use the following Entity Framework features with Salesforce Marketing Cloud data:

LINQ to Entities (no need for Salesforce Marketing Cloud API)
Entity relations with lazy/eager loading
No need to post each edited/created object separately - a single SaveChanges() call to persist all the changed objects

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides enhanced Entity Framework support for Salesforce Marketing Cloud data with a bundled visual designer for ORM models with Visual Studio integration - Entity Developer. Standard Visual Studio Entity Data Model designer is also supported.

How it Works

Advanced Queries

Simple Queries

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More complex queries are split in parts, and parts of query are executed against Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Simple queries are directly compiled to Salesforce Marketing Cloud calls

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Our local SQL engine processes the results and applies advanced SQL features, used in the query

These API calls are executed on Salesforce Marketing Cloud side providing the best performance

Data
Returned data are passed to the application

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers powerful local SQL engine for SELECT statement execution. It executes SQL statements in the following way:

Simple SQL statements are translated to Salesforce Marketing Cloud API calls and executed on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud side directly. However, dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud also supports more advanced SQL features, such as SQL functions or expressions, complex WHERE conditions, joins, etc.

If you use these more advanced SQL features, dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud queries all the data from the objects that participate in the query, and executes the statement locally.

How to Start

dotConnect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a detailed documentation that can help you quickly get started with our product. Read our tutorials first:

Connect

Connecting to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

This tutorial describes how to connect to Salesforce Marketing Cloud either from Visual Studio Server Explorer or from application code via ExactTargetConnection.

Read Tutorial

Retrieve

Retrieving Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data

This tutorial describes how to retrieve Salesforce Marketing Cloud data with the ExactTargetDataAdapter class or with ExactTargetCommand and ExactTargetDataReader.

Read Tutorial

Update

Updating Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data

This tutorial describes how to manage Salesforce Marketing Cloud data with SQL and the ExactTargetCommand class or with the ExactTargetDataAdapter class.

Read Tutorial