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Google Contacts Icon Google Contacts ADO.NET Provider

An easy-to-use database-like interface for .NET applications access to live Google Contacts data (Contacts, Groups, etc).

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LINQ to Google Contacts 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 Google Contacts Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    You can connect to Google APIs on behalf of individual users or on behalf of a domain. Google uses the OAuth authentication standard. See the "Getting Started" section of the help documentation for a guide.

  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting GoogleContactsEntities 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:

GoogleContactsEntities context = new GoogleContactsEntities(); var friendsQuery = from friends in context.Friends select friends; foreach (var result in friendsQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Summary); }

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