LINQ to Pushbullet 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 Pushbullet Data Provider.

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

    Using API Key Authentication

    Pushbullet uses token-based authentication (Access Token). To obtain an Access Token:

    1. Log in to your Pushbullet account at https://www.pushbullet.com
    2. Navigate to Settings > Account
    3. Click "Create Access Token"
    4. Copy the generated token

    After obtaining your Access Token, set the following connection properties:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
    Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:
    • APIKey: Set this to your Pushbullet Access Token.

    Example Connection String

    Profile=C:\profiles\Pushbullet.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_access_token;';AuthScheme=APIKey;
    

    Connecting to Pushbullet

    Once the authentication is configured, you can connect to Pushbullet and query data from any of the available tables such as Users, Pushes, Devices, Chats, Subscriptions, and Channels.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\Pushbullet.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_access_token;';AuthScheme=APIKey;
  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 usersQuery = from users in context.Users
  select users;

foreach (var result in usersQuery) {
  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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