LINQ to MailChimp Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can set the APIKey to the key you generate in your account settings, or, instead of providing your APIKey, you can use the OAuth standard to authenticate the application. OAuth can be used to enable other users to access their own data. To authenticate using OAuth, obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL by registering an app with MailChimp.

   See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   APIKey=myAPIKey;

👁 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 MailChimpEntities 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 , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

MailChimpEntities context = new MailChimpEntities();

var listsQuery = from lists in context.Lists
 select lists;

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

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