LINQ to MarkLogic Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   Set User, Password, and Server to the credentials for the MarkLogic account and the address of the server you want to connect to. You should also specify the REST API Port if you want to use a specific instance of a REST Server.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   User='myusername';Password='mypassword';Server='http://marklogic';

👁 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 MarkLogicEntities 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:

MarkLogicEntities context = new MarkLogicEntities();

var customerQuery = from customer in context.Customer
 select customer;

foreach (var result in customerQuery) {
 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.