LINQ to Discourse Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The Discourse API uses API Key authentication.

   Using API Key Authentication

   Discourse requires API Key and Username for authentication. API Keys are generated in the Discourse Admin panel under the API section. You can create user-specific API keys or all-users API keys. Once you have obtained the API Key, set it along with the Domain and Username in the ProfileSettings connection property.

   Example Connection string

   Profile=C:\profiles\Discourse.apip;ProfileSettings='Domain=forum.example.com;APIKey=your_api_key;Username=your_username;'AuthScheme=APIKey;
   

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Discourse.apip;ProfileSettings='Domain=forum.example.com;APIKey=your_api_key;Username=your_username;'AuthScheme=APIKey;


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 backupsQuery = from backups in context.Backups
  select backups;

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

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