LINQ to Azure Data Catalog Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can optionally set the following to read the different catalog data returned from Azure Data Catalog.

   <>CatalogName: Set this to the CatalogName associated with your Azure Data Catalog. To get your Catalog name, navigate to your Azure Portal home page > Data Catalog > Catalog Name

   Connect Using OAuth Authentication

   You must use OAuth to authenticate with Azure Data Catalog. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Azure Data Catalog using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the help documentation.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;

👁 Required connection properties for the data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting AzureDataCatalogEntities 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:

AzureDataCatalogEntities context = new AzureDataCatalogEntities();

var tablesQuery = from tables in context.Tables
 select tables;

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

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