LINQ to eBay Data



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 eBay Data Provider.

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

    If you will be accessing your own account, you can generate an OAuthAccessToken from your developer account dashboard. You can also allow other users to securely access their own accounts.

    Both of these methods require you to create an application key set to obtain values for the following connection properties: AppId, CertId, DevId, and SiteId.

    The user consent flow additionally requires the RuName and CallbackURL.

    See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    AppId=MyAppId;CertId=MyCertId;DevId=MyDevId;SiteId=MySiteId;RuName=MyRuName;CallbackURL=http://localhost:33333;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting EbayEntities 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 , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

EbayEntities context = new EbayEntities(); var itemlistingQuery = from itemlisting in context.ItemListing select itemlisting; foreach (var result in itemlistingQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Title); }

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

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