Error: Entity Id is Invalid when viewing Business Data Catalog entity
Posted
Monday, April 13, 2009 3:49 PM
by
CoreyRoth
Recently, I was troubleshooting and Enterprise Search / BDC issue and I encountered the following error when trying to view the entity page of a given LOB system.
Entity id is invalid
As usual, this error was completely and totally useless. I really needed to be able to view the details of my entity to ensure proper configuration and security settings, so I decided to pursue an answer. After looking at the 12 hive logs as well as the event log, I found the following error.
Runtime Error in method ViewBDCEntity.OnLoad of type System.UriFormatException.The exception was System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed.
In this particular application definition, I am appending a relative URL onto a server name. So in this case, my action url looks like http://server{0} where my Action Paramter would contain something like /Sites/SomeSubSite. SharePoint does not like this one bit. Although, the search crawler has no issue with it and you will be able to link to sites fine, this causes the BDC entity page on your SSP to completely die.
How did I resolve it? I tried just adding a slash after the server name (i.e.: http://server/{0}). This works, but you do end up with two slashes in your URL. I’m not sure of a better way to fix it for now, so it will have to do for now.
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