LINQ to Twitter Ads Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   All tables require authentication. You must use OAuth to authenticate with Twitter. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Twitter using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the Help documentation.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   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 TwitterAdsEntities 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:

TwitterAdsEntities context = new TwitterAdsEntities();

var adstatsQuery = from adstats in context.AdStats
 select adstats;

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

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