To establish a connection to a CSV data source, the ADO.NET Provider can be used through the C1CSVConnection class. This class requires a connection string to be provided as an argument, which can be created in either of the following ways:

• Generated using the C1CSVConnectionStringBuilder class by specifying individual statements.
• Constructed manually by writing the connection string directly.

Connection string generation

The following code shows how a connection string can be configured by the C1CSVConnectionStringBuilder class and consumed by the C1CSVConnection class to create a connection to CSV server. Through that connection, the data source can be queried, updated, etc.

//JSON service uri
const string csvUri = "sampleCSV.csv";

//configure connection string
C1CSVConnectionStringBuilder connectionStringBuilder = new C1CSVConnectionStringBuilder();
connectionStringBuilder.Uri = csvUri;
connectionStringBuilder.TrimValues = true;
           
//Setup Connection
C1CSVConnection con = new C1CSVConnection(connectionStringBuilder.ConnectionString);

Connection string literal

Alternatively, the connection string can be written directly as shown in the following code. A similar approach can be implemented in other DataConnectors for ADO.NET provider.

//Create connection string
static string csvConnectionString = $"Uri='sampleCSV.csv'";

//Setup Connection
C1CSVConnection con = new C1CSVConnection(csvConnectionString);

CSV Data Sources

The ADO.NET provider for CSV allows you to connect to local and https CSV resources. To connect to these resources, you only need to set the Uri property to the CSV resource location. Additionally, you can set other properties such as TrimValues, and ContainsHeaders which can be helpful in the manipulation of the CSV resource.

Connect to Local Files

To connect to a local file, you can create a connection string by setting the Uri property to a CSV file as shown in the following code:

static string csvConnectionString = $"Uri='sampleCSV.csv'";

Connect to HTTP CSV Streams

To connect to an HTTP file, you can create a connection string by setting the Uri property to the HTTP or HTTPS URL of the CSV resource you want to access as a table, as shown in the following code:

static string documentConnectionString = $"Uri='https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTgdxvUJhf8i6ri1a_y5gUUwKuFr3zz5J6h0W0gqWev7AT1BK916NJnD3YxB6KRouQXSf6cO5DoUqlm/pub?gid=1155993230&single=true&output=csv'";