Demo - Use query parameters to optimize Microsoft Graph Requests

Key Takeaways

the current console application isn't efficient because it retrieves all the information about all the users in your organization but it only displays three properties so i can use a query parameter to limit the amount of information that's returned by microsoft graph to optimize that query so let's go back to our main method where we're making the request and so you can see we're making requests right here to client.users so what i'm going to do is right after this request i'm going to add in another statement here for a select statement and what that's going to allow me to do is it's going to allow me to define just the properties that i want to have returned in my query so i'll choose u dot display name and u dot mail so that's only going to fetch two properties so i can get the make the exact same request so net build followed by dot net run and we should see the exact same thing in our results because we're still displaying only the display name and the mail address but a lot more stuff or a lot fewer a lot less data is coming across in fact you can see we're making a reference to the id of the user up here on line 32 but it's not showing up because we didn't say that was one of the properties that we want to return so let's do a little bit more work with this i can limit this even further to just give me the top 15 results so i can do that by after the my select statement i can add a top query or top parameter and so when i run it this time it's only going to show me the top 15 users and here enough you can see a much smaller list of users are being returned this time now another thing that we can do is i can also have microsoft graph sort the list of users that come back so that i don't have to do that in my own code so i'm going to do that by again after the top query i'm going to use the order by and i'm going to pass in a property so i want to sort them by their display name but i want to do it in descending order so i'll say display name and ds desc so by default it's going to be an ascending order but i'm going to flip it around and say no we want it in descending order where it'd be like z through a instead of a through z so now we can see that we have that showing up for us as well now i can further refine the results by selecting users but only have a specific surname so like i only want people that have a last name of a that starts with an a a b or c now to do this what i'm going to do is i'm going to comment out our order by we're not going to use that one but i am going to add in a filter now the filter statement you're going to write this rather lengthy query here but all the query is going to be is you're really just going to say semicolon should be on the outside i'm going to say starts with surname a so what that's doing is that's saying i'm only looking for the surname property that begins with the letter a using by using the startswith operator so what i can then do is i can also add in a boolean statement here so i can see where it's or it starts with a b or it starts with a c and i'll save my changes so now let me go ahead and run this and now we can see we're getting even a smaller list because now we're only seeing people whose last names or surnames begin with the letter a b or c and so in this case we only have five users come back so in this demo you saw how i created an azure ad app and a net console app that retrieved user data from microsoft graph and then i use query parameters specifically the select top order by and f and filter to limit and manipulate the data that's returned by microsoft graph to optimize our query