LINQ to Office 365 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 Office 365 Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Office 365 via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Office 365. 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 Office 365 Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Office 365 uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate requests, obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and OAuthCallbackURL by registering an app with Office 365. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    OAuthClientId=MyApplicationId;OAuthClientSecret=MyAppKey;OAuthCallbackURL=http://localhost:33333;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting Office365Entities 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:

Office365Entities context = new Office365Entities(); var filesQuery = from files in context.Files select files; foreach (var result in filesQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Name); }

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

Ready to get started?

Download a free trial of the Office 365 Data Provider to get started:

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The Office 365 Data Provider gives developers the power to easily connect .NET applications to Microsoft Office 365 data including Outlook Mail, Contact, Calendar, Files, and more!

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