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Facebook ADO.NET Provider
Connect any Web, Desktop, or Mobile .NET application with Facebook data including Events, Groups, Pages, Places, Posts and more!
LINQ to Facebook 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 Facebook Data Provider.
This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Facebook via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Facebook. 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.
- 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.
- Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
- Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Facebook Data Source".
Enter your data source connection information.
Most tables require user authentication as well as application authentication. Facebook uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate to Facebook, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can obtain your own by registering an app with Facebook.
See the Getting Started chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.
- If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting FacebookEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
- 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:
FacebookEntities context = new FacebookEntities();
var postsQuery = from posts in context.Posts
select posts;
foreach (var result in postsQuery) {
Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.FromName);
}
See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.
Data Connectors
ETL/ ELT Solutions
Cloud & API Connectivity
OEM & Custom Drivers