LINQ to Clarifai Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

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

   Clarifai API Profile Settings

   Clarifai uses Personal Access Tokens (PATs) for authentication. To obtain a PAT:

   1. Log in to your Clarifai account at https://clarifai.com.
   2. Navigate to your profile settings and select Security.
   3. Click Create Personal Access Token.
   4. Select the required scopes and click Create Token.
   5. Copy the generated token (it will only be shown once).

   After obtaining your Personal Access Token, set the following connection properties:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.

   Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:

   • APIKey: Set this to your Clarifai Personal Access Token (PAT).

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Clarifai.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_access_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 appsQuery = from apps in context.Apps
  select apps;

foreach (var result in appsQuery) {
  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.