LINQ to CircleCI Data

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
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 CircleCI Data Provider.

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

    Using API Key Authentication

    CircleCI uses personal API tokens to authenticate API requests. To generate a personal API token, log in to your CircleCI account, navigate to User Settings > Personal API Tokens, and click Create New Token. Copy the token value immediately as it is only shown once.

    After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
    • APIKey: Set this to your CircleCI personal API token.

    Example connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\CircleCI.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_api_token';
    

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\CircleCI.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_api_token';
  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 artifactsQuery = from artifacts in context.Artifacts
  select artifacts;

foreach (var result in artifactsQuery) {
  Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.);
}

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

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