LINQ to Bing Ads 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 Bing Ads Data Provider.

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

    The Bing Ads APIs use the OAuth 2 standard. To authenticate, you will need valid Bing Ads OAuth credentials and you will need to obtain a developer token. See the Getting Started section in the Bing Ads data provider help documentation for an authentication guide.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    OAuthClientId=MyOAuthClientId; OAuthClientSecret=MyOAuthClientSecret; CallbackURL=http://localhost:portNumber; AccountId=442311; CustomerId=5521444; DeveloperToken=11112332233;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting BingAdsEntities 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:

BingAdsEntities context = new BingAdsEntities(); var adgroupsQuery = from adgroups in context.AdGroups select adgroups; foreach (var result in adgroupsQuery) { 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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Bing Ads Icon Bing Ads ADO.NET Provider

An easy-to-use database-like interface for .NET applications access to live Bing Ads data (Campaigns, Ads, Customers, and more).