LINQ to Scrapfly Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   The Scrapfly API uses API Key authentication. The API key is passed as the key query parameter on every request.

   Using API Key Authentication

   Your Scrapfly API key is required to create a connection. To obtain your API key:

   1. Log into your Scrapfly account at scrapfly.io.
   2. Navigate to Dashboard and select API Keys.
   3. Copy your API key (begins with scp-live- for production or scp-test- for the test environment).

   After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

   • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
   • APIKey: Set this to your Scrapfly API key.

   Example connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Scrapfly.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';
   

   Below is a typical connection string:

   Profile=C:\profiles\Scrapfly.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';

👁 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 accountQuery = from account in context.Account
 select account;

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

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