LINQ to GitLab Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

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

   GitLab API Profile Settings

   Create a Personal Access Token in GitLab under User Settings > Access Tokens, selecting the required scopes (e.g.,

   read_api

   ,

   api

   ).

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\GitLab.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_access_token';

👁 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 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 accessrequestsQuery = from accessrequests in context.AccessRequests
 select accessrequests;

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

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