LINQ to Hacker News Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Connecting to HackerNews

   The HackerNews API (powered by Firebase) is a public API that requires no authentication. You can connect and query data immediately without any credentials.

   After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to None.

   Example connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\HackerNews.apip;AuthScheme=None
   

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\HackerNews.apip;AuthScheme=None


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 topstoriesQuery = from topstories in context.TopStories
  select topstories;

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

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