LINQ to eBay Analytics Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can authenticate to eBay Analytics only via the OAuth 2 authentication method. The eBay Analytics API requires an access token created with the authorization code grant flow to authorize the requests.

   You can follow the guide in the Help documentation for a step by step guide on how to authenticate using the OAuth 2 protocol.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   OAuthClientId=MyAppID;OAuthClientSecret=MyCertID;RuName=MyRuName;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 EbayAnalyticsEntities 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:

EbayAnalyticsEntities context = new EbayAnalyticsEntities();

var trafficreportbylistingQuery = from trafficreportbylisting in context.TrafficReportByListing
 select trafficreportbylisting;

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

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