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Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with delimited flat-file (CSV/TSV) data.

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LINQ to CSV Data


LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the CSV Data Provider.

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

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    The DataSource property must be set to a valid local folder name.

    Also, specify the IncludeFiles property to work with text files having extensions that differ from .csv, .tab, or .txt. Specify multiple file extensions in a comma-separated list. You can also set Extended Properties compatible with the Microsoft Jet OLE DB 4.0 driver. Alternatively, you can provide the format of text files in a Schema.ini file.

    Set UseRowNumbers to true if you are deleting or updating in CSV. This will create a new column with the name RowNumber which will be used as key for that table.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    DataSource=MyCSVFilesFolder;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting CSVEntities 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:

CSVEntities context = new CSVEntities(); var customerQuery = from customer in context.Customer select customer; foreach (var result in customerQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.City); }

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