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FTP Icon FTP ADO.NET Provider

An easy-to-use database-like interface for .NET applications access to remote files and directories.

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LINQ to FTP 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 FTP Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect to FTP or SFTP servers, specify at least RemoteHost and FileProtocol. Specify the port with RemotePort.

    Set User and Password to perform Basic authentication. Set SSHAuthMode to use SSH authentication. See the Getting Started section of the data provider help documentation for more information on authenticating via SSH.

    Set SSLMode and SSLServerCert to secure connections with SSL.

    The data provider lists the tables based on the available folders in your FTP server. Set the following connection properties to control the relational view of the file system:

    • RemotePath: Set this to the current working directory.
    • TableDepth: Set this to control the depth of folders to list as views.
    • FileRetrievalDepth: Set this to retrieve and list files recursively from the root table.

    Stored Procedures are available to download files, upload files, and send protocol commands. See the Data Model chapter of the FTP data provider documentation for more information.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    RemoteHost=MyFTPServer;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting FTPEntities 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:

FTPEntities context = new FTPEntities(); var mydirectoryQuery = from mydirectory in context.MyDirectory select mydirectory; foreach (var result in mydirectoryQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Filesize); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.