LINQ to Browse AI Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the BrowseAI Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\BrowseAI.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for BrowseAI (see below).

   BrowseAI API Profile Settings

   BrowseAI is a web scraping and automation platform that allows you to train robots to extract and monitor data from websites. Authentication is performed using an API key that is sent as a Bearer token in the Authorization header.

   The BrowseAI API key has the format {userId}:{apiKey}, where both parts are UUIDs separated by a colon. This full string is provided as a single value in the BrowseAI dashboard.

   To obtain your API key:

   1. Log in to your BrowseAI account at https://app.browse.ai
   2. Navigate to Settings in the dashboard
   3. Locate the API section
   4. Copy the full API key string displayed (format: userId:apiKey)

   After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.

   Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:

   • APIKey: Set this to your BrowseAI API key (format: userId:apiKey).

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\BrowseAI.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_user_id:your_api_key';


5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting APIEntities 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 commands. For example:

APIEntities context = new APIEntities();

var robottasksQuery = from robottasks in context.RobotTasks
  select robottasks;

foreach (var result in robottasksQuery) {
  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.