LINQ to YouTube Analytics Data

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

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   YouTube Analytics uses the OAuth authentication standard. You can use the embedded CData OAuth credentials or you can register an application with Google to obtain your own.

   In addition to the OAuth values, to access YouTube Analytics data set ChannelId to the Id of a YouTube channel. You can obtain the channel Id in the advanced account settings for your channel. If not specified, the channel of the currently authenticated user will be used.

   If you want to generate content owner reports, specify the ContentOwnerId property. This is the Id of the copyright holder for content in YouTube's rights management system. The content owner is the person or organization that claims videos and sets their monetization policy.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   ContentOwnerId=MyContentOwnerId;ChannelId=MyChannelId;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 YouTubeAnalyticsEntities 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:

YouTubeAnalyticsEntities context = new YouTubeAnalyticsEntities();

var groupsQuery = from groups in context.Groups
 select groups;

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

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