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The easiest way to integrate powerful Gmail send and receive capabilities with .NET applications. Send & Receive Email, manage Gmail folders & Messages, and more!

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LINQ to Gmail 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 Gmail Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    There are two ways to authenticate to Gmail. Before selecting one, first ensure that you have enabled IMAP access in your Gmail account settings. See the "Connecting to Gmail" section under "Getting Started" in the installed documentation for a guide.

    The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, can be set to valid Gmail user credentials.

    Alternatively, instead of providing the Password, you can use the OAuth authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

    OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, you will need to register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

    In addition to the OAuth values, you will need to provide the User. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    User=username;Password=password;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting GmailEntities 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:

GmailEntities context = new GmailEntities(); var inboxQuery = from inbox in context.Inbox select inbox; foreach (var result in inboxQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Subject); }

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