LINQ to Carbone Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

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

   Carbone API Profile Settings

   Carbone uses API key authentication via a Bearer token in the Authorization header. To obtain an API key:

   1. Log in to your Carbone account at https://account.carbone.io
   2. Copy the API key shown on the account home page

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

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
   • APIKey: Set this to your Carbone API key (Bearer token).
   • CarboneVersion: (Optional) The major version of the Carbone API to target via the carbone-version request header. Defaults to 5. Accepted values: 5, 4, 3, staging.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Carbone.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;APIKey=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 templatesQuery = from templates in context.Templates
  select templates;

foreach (var result in templatesQuery) {
  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.