Querying and updating the database with a table

Now that we have the entity classes created, we will use them to interact with the database. We will first work with the products table to query and update records as well as to insert and delete records.

Querying records

First we will query the database to get some products.

To query a database using LINQ to Entities we first need to construct an ObjectContext object, like this:

NorthwindEntities NWEntities = new NorthwindEntities();

We can then use LINQ query syntax to retrieve records from the database:

IEnumerable<Product> beverages = from p in NWEntities.Products
                     where p.Category.CategoryName == "Beverages"
                     orderby p.ProductName
                     select p;

The preceding code will retrieve all of the products in the Beverages category sorted by product name.

You can use this statement to print out the total number of beverage products in the Northwind database:

Console.WriteLine("There are {0} Beverages...