LINQ to Yotpo Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Yotpo Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Yotpo.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Yotpo (see below).

   Yotpo API Profile Settings

   To authenticate to Yotpo, you can use the OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow with your Yotpo AppKey and AppSecret.

   To use the Yotpo API, you need a Yotpo store account with an AppKey and AppSecret. You can find these credentials in the Yotpo dashboard under Account Settings > Store.

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

   • AuthScheme: Set this to OAuthClient.
   • InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to manage the process to obtain the OAuthAccessToken.
   • OAuthClientId: Set this to your Yotpo AppKey.
   • OAuthClientSecret: Set this to your Yotpo AppSecret.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Yotpo.apip;AuthScheme=OAuthClient;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;OAuthClientId=your_app_key;OAuthClientSecret=your_app_secret;


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 productbottomlineQuery = from productbottomline in context.ProductBottomLine
  select productbottomline;

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

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