Viewing Telegram Data in RAD Studio Data Explorer
Embarcadero RAD Studio provides a development environment for Delphi and C++Builder applications. With the CData ODBC Driver for Telegram, you gain access to live Telegram data within RAD Studio, abstracting the data into tables, views, and stored procedures that can be used to both retrieve Telegram data. This article will walk through connecting to Telegram using the Data Explorer.
Configure a Connection to Telegram
If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.
Using API Key Authentication
Telegram uses Bot Tokens to authenticate API requests. You can obtain a Bot Token by creating a bot via BotFather on Telegram (https://t.me/BotFather). Once created, BotFather will provide a token in the format
123456789:ABCdefGhIJKlmNoPQRsTUVwxyZ.
After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:
- AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
- APIKey: Set this to your Telegram Bot Token obtained from BotFather.
Example connection string
Profile=C:\profiles\Telegram.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_bot_token';
Connecting to Telegram Data Using Data Explorer
You can create a simple application for displaying Telegram data by utilizing the CData FireDAC Components for Telegram and a new VCL Forms Application:
- Open the Data Explorer in RAD Studio and expand FireDAC.
- Right-click the ODBC Data Source node in the Data Explorer.
- Click Add New Connection.
- Enter a name for the connection.
- In the FireDAC Connection Editor that appears, set the DataSource property to the name of the ODBC DSN for Telegram.
- Back in the Data Explorer, expand the views for the connection.
Create a new VCL Forms application and drag a view (for example: AvailableGifts) onto the form.
- Select the AvailableGiftsView object on the form and set the Active property to true.
Right-click on the object, bind visually, and link everything (*) to a new control (TStringGrid).
Arrange the TStringGrid on the form and run the application to see the AvailableGifts data.
Related Articles
Below you can find other articles for using the CData ODBC Driver with RAD Studio, Delphi, and C++ Builder.