LINQ to Hugging Face Data

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
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 Hugging Face Data Provider.

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

    HuggingFace Hub uses token-based authentication to enable access to its API. The API provides access to machine learning models, datasets, spaces, papers, and other resources on the HuggingFace Hub platform.

    Using API Key Authentication

    To authenticate to HuggingFace Hub, you will need to provide an API Key (Access Token). To obtain your access token:

    1. Log in to your HuggingFace account at https://huggingface.co
    2. Navigate to Settings > Access Tokens
    3. Click "New token" to create a new access token
    4. Select the appropriate permissions (read or write)
    5. Copy the token value

    After obtaining your access token, set the following connection properties:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
    • APIKey: Set this to your HuggingFace access token.

    Example connection string

    Profile=C:\profiles\HuggingFace.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';
    

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\HuggingFace.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';
  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 collectionsQuery = from collections in context.Collections
  select collections;

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

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

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