Corey Roth [MVP] : Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint 2010, Business Data Catalog, SharePoint

Slides from my talks at SPTechCon Boston 2011

CoreyRoth — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:54:46 GMT

This post is long overdue, but better late than never. I had a great time at SPTechCon 2011 in Boston. I had the chance to meet a lot of people in person for the first time that I had only previously known through twitter. I gave two talks this year. The first being my Instant ECM talk showing you how to leverage out-of-the-box SharePoint ECM features. My second talk was an advanced developer talk discussing how to build Business Data Connectivity models and custom connectors. My slides can be found on SlideShare. It was definitely great to get out to the east coast and see how people were using SharePoint.

Instant ECM with SharePoint 2010 - SPTechCon Boston 2011 Slides

Advanced BCS: Business Data Connectivity Models and Custom Connectors – SPTechCon 2011 Slides

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How to: Create a BCS Profile Page in SharePoint 2010

CoreyRoth — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:36:42 GMT

I was working on updating my Search demo for #spshou and my BCS search results were really ugly. I didn’t have a default action specified on my search results, nor did I have a profile page, so instead the search results would give me the BDC protocol URL which is not usable by an end user.

In MOSS 2007, if you did not create a default action, it would automatically create a profile page for you. In SharePoint 2010, this is not the case. It’s pretty easy but there are a few steps involved.

Start by opening SharePoint Designer and open your external content type in question. In the top right, you will find the Create Profile Page button.

Give it a click. However, if you haven’t configured a profile host URL, you will get the following error. Chances are you haven’t configured one of these yet.

Unable to provision profile page because the profile host URL was not specified.

After doing a search, I found only one usable result on the Internet on MSDN forums. It had the answer, but it wasn’t clear to me at first. It said to use the Configure button in the ribbon. However, I was looking in SPD, and in fact its in the Service Application instead as you can see below.

Select the application you want to edit and then you can click Configure. This brings up the popup shown below which prompts you for a URL of the site that to keep you profile pages in. I like this since you can configure these at a per application definition level now instead of one location for every entity on the SSP.

I decided that I wanted my profile pages in a specific subsite, so I went ahead and created a new one.

After I finished configuring my site and setting up the Profile Page Host, I was able to go back to SPD and click the button. This pops up a progress bar, but it doesn’t really give you any visual indication that anything is done. I then went back to my content sources and recrawled my BCS content source. When it finished, I executed a new search, and now I get actual usable URLs in my search results.

As you can see it generated kind of a long URL with _bdc in it. I believe the http and sp2010 come from the namespace specified in SharePoint Designer. Finally it names a page after the entity itself. So far, I’m not sure if any of the page name stuff is configurable or not, so I need to look into that. Once you click on the page, you get a simple profile page to display the results.

It’s simple, but it has all the pertinent information from the underlying database table. It beats what I had before. I think a custom default action can be specified just like in MOSS 2007, but I get the feeling you have to edit the application definition XML manually to make it happen. I’m still looking into it. Anyhow, I hope this helps, the next time you try to use the BCS.

Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group – How the SharePoint 2010 BCS will change your life

CoreyRoth — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:51:49 GMT

I’m excited to bring a SharePoint 2010 talk to the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group this Monday (4/12). Here is a brief summary.

How many hours have your wasted building simple ASP.NET applications to do nothing more than simple CRUD operations against a database? Many tools have made this easier, but now it's so easy, you'll be up and running in minutes. This session will show you hot easy it is to get started integrating external data from your line of business systems in SharePoint 2010. You will learn how to register an external content type using SharePoint Designer based upon a database table or web service and then build an external list. With external lists, you will see how you can perform CRUD operations on your line of business directly from SharePoint without ever having to do manual configuration in XML files. Finally, we will walk through how to create custom edit forms for your list using InfoPath 2010.

For more information or to register, click here.

Also, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group is now on twitter @TulsaSPIG.

Speaking about How Business Connectivity Services (BCS) may change your life in SharePoint 2010 at Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group on 4/12

CoreyRoth — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:00:09 GMT

Ok, so the title may be overly dramatic, but the BCS is really freaking cool now. With SharePoint 2010 just around the corner, now is the time to start learning how you can leverage it. I’ll be talking about the Business Connectivity Services at the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group on 4/12. If you’re not familiar with everything yet, here is what has changed. The Business Data Catalog from MOSS 2007 had morphed into the new Business Connectivity Services also known as the BCS. To add to the confusion, there are places where you will still see term BDC lying around such as the case of the BDC entity model (although maybe the name has changed by now). With 2010, we get the ability to easily and quickly create new application definitions using SharePoint Designer 2010. On top of that the data we have abstracted through the BCS can be manipulated in something new called the external list. It’s so cool that in fact you can edit and do all CRUD operations on that external list and the changes get persisted to the backend database (or web service, etc). If you’re not familiar with the BCS yet, this is a must-see session.

If you are going to make it to the event, please RSVP. Thanks.

It’s easy to configure an External List with Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint Foundation 2010

CoreyRoth — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:02:01 GMT

One of my favorite features in SharePoint 2010 is External Lists. If you haven’t heard by now, the MOSS 2007 Business Data Catalog (BDC) has become Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010. The ever better part is that it is included in SharePoint Foundation and does not require SharePoint Server. One new concept that we get from this is the External List. To the end user, these look like regular lists in SharePoint, however they really are reaching out to external systems such as databases and web services. Whereas the BDC only “officially” supported read operations, the BCS supports full CRUD operations on your external data source.

The title of the article mentions how easy it is to set up. As you will see shortly, it really is quite easy using SharePoint Designer. In fact, if you have a database table, you can have it exposed in SharePoint in under 10 minutes. If you worked with the BDC before, you know that we had to manipulate huge XML files that represented the application definition. We relied on third party tools to make this easier, but it was never a clean experience until now. Before we get started with SharePoint Designer though, first make sure that you have the Business Data Connectivity (likely to be renamed) Service Application started. To verify this go to Central Administration –> Manage Service Applications.

You can tell this is SharePoint Foundation since there are only a few Service Applications (SA). Ok, admittedly it could be server with very few installed, but you get the point. If you click the Manage button, you can manage any application definitions you have created already. Although, we’ll skip this since we’ll be using SharePoint Designer. If the SA is not started for some reason, go to Central Administration –> Services on Server and click Start next to the appropriate service. Also remember if you are using Windows Server 2008 R2, you will need to have the WCF hotfix installed before any SA works.

Now let’s take a look at our table. In my case I have a table of products with a few columns. I want to expose this table to SharePoint and make it editable.

Now open SharePoint Designer 2010 and connect to your SharePoint site. My server is called sp2010, so I would click open site and then enter http://sp2010. SharePoint Designer is redesigned and has a new item on the left-hand tab called External Content Types. This is where we want to go. Click the External Content Type button in the New section of the ribbon.

It will take a minute, but then you will get some details about your new External Content Type. Here is what mine looks like after I gave it a name of Products.

We’re then going to click the link Click here to discover external data sources and define operations. This is where we pick that we want to pull data from my database table. We can also use this to connect to a web service or talk to a custom .NET object.

I’m just going to go with the defaults on the next screen for my data connection. I gave it my database name of bcs_test as well as my SQL Server name. You can also configure out which identity is used here to talk to the database. Remember that you may need to grant permissions on the SQL Server itself for the appropriate user. It will then iterate your data source and display it to you. Pick out the table you want, and then right click on it. This gives you a list of operations you can add as you can see below.

As you can see, you can add individual operations such as Read Item, Read List, Create, Update, and Delete. You can also create an association if you have multiple tables related to each other. However, I want everything, so I am going to choose Create All Operations. This starts a wizard. The most important part for you will be the Parameters configuration. Here you set what field to show in a picker control as well as what the id is. Usually, you don’t need to configure much. Here I am setting that the name field should show up in the picker.

It automatically detects my primary key and maps it to the identifier for me.

You can also specify an Office Property to allow you to map things into existing types such as an Outlook Contact or Task. This lets you use Office to edit things directly in the BCS. I won’t cover that today though since that is a little bit more involved. The next step in the wizard allows you to do some filtering. In my case, I am skipping it.

When that is finished, go back to the main tab for your External Content Type and you should see something like this. It has the operations you have chosen as well as what fields are in the type.

Now, we want to save out External Content Type, by pressing the Save (Disk Icon) in the top left corner. On to the fun part. Let’s use SharePoint Designer to create an External List by using the Create Lists & Form button in the ribbon.

Clicking it you will get the following screen asking about your list. I’m calling my lists Products and I just use default values for the rest. If you are using server, you can click the Create InfoPath Form checkbox and you will be able to customize the InfoPath form for the list right there. Since we are using Foundation today, I’ll leave that unchecked.

You can also create the list directly through SharePoint as well. Once the list is created, go to your SharePoint site, navigate to the list, and you should see something that looks like this.

Comparing it to my table from the SQL Server, you can see that it matches. You can see that it looks a lot like a regular list in SharePoint. Now, what if I want to change the price on the Plush Bear? Not a problem. Click on the item and select edit, change the value in the form and save it.

Now what does the data in SQL look like?

It has the new price of course. You can also add and delete rows and perform bulk operations, but screenshots really don’t do it justice. It’s this simple to set up, you should go out and try it for yourself. One reminder, I will give you is that even though this looks like a list, it doesn’t always quite act like a list. You won’t find it in SPWeb.Lists for example. There are a also a number of other things that do and don’t work. Be on the lookout for a follow-up post on what you can and can’t do with an external list. This is a great new feature in SharePoint 2010 and I hope you will like it as much as I do.

Features I am looking forward to the most in SharePoint 2010

CoreyRoth — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:47:36 GMT

I’m not privy to the NDA, so I got to look at some of the new SharePoint 2010 (#sp2010) information for the first time with the Sneak Peak videos on the Microsoft site. I’ll try not to just repeat information in the videos, but tell you what I am looking forward to and make comments. I am sure everything they have stated so far is subject to change, but if half of it even gets implemented we’ll be in good shape. As I was watching the admin video, the first thing that I noted is that there will be a logging database. This appears to replace the need to find errors in the 12 hive’s LOGS folder. This is very exciting and should make it much easier to track down problems. Also of interest is that there is much improved export support and you will be able to backup specific sites and lists. This one is a no-brainer and should have always been included to begin with.

Another thing I saw was various things to help support large lists. The first thing being an admin configurable threshold on allowing how many items can be displayed in the default view at a time. The default was 5000 in the demo, so I am wondering if this will be the new suggested limit as opposed to the existing 3000 item limit today. What is cool is that the interface will display all of the items for an administrator but it will notify a regular user that too many items have been returned and that they need to use a filter.

Visual Studio 2010 looks like it will be a great experience for developing SharePoint solutions. Out-of-the-box there is built in support for editing all types of things in SharePoint including importing workflows created by SharePoint Designer and existing .wsp packages. Building web parts no longer requires generating HTML via code due to the new Visual Web Part Designer. It appears they created a new typed called VisualWebPartUserControl which inherits from UserControl. You can drag and drop controls right onto the design surface and then easily deploy the web part with minimal effort. There are lots of designers and tools for working with the features and solution package itself, but it appears it takes care of most everything for you while still allowing you to customize things when you need to.

The changes to the Business Data Catalog really excite me. The BDC is now known as Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Application definition files can be created easily with Visual Studio 2010 or SPD. A visual design surface is available and allows you to easily create an application definition for an entity which comes from a database, web service, or .NET object. It also now has true insert/update/delete support and will create the methods in your application definition so that you can use that functionality later in a list. The new External List feature allows you to associate this application definition with a list and perform all of the CRUD operations on it just like it was a regular SharePoint list. This will make it very easy to integrate external data into SharePoint. My only question with this that comes to mind is there a way to customize the edit form or will that result in an unsupported scenario.

Some other cool things about the BCS is that it integrates with Office. Document templates can be created and data can be retrieved directly from the BCS to fill in values in a document. Microsoft Groove has been renamed SharePoint Workspace and provides a graphical interface for working with SharePoint. On top of that it provides the capability of syncing entire sites offline including BCS data. Documents can be updated and LOB data can be changed and then it can be synced back to SharePoint. I think this will provide great functionality for any type of field or remote users who are occasionally connected.

As a developer, another feature I was really excited about was LINQ support for SharePoint lists. You will be able to point the spmetal tool at a SharePoint list to generate a strongly typed data context class. You can then query the list as you would anything else using LINQ. I took a look at the CTP of the Developer Documentation today as well. It looks like all of the collections now have a method called GetTypeEnumerator(T). This returns an IEnumerator<T> which means any collection that implements this can also be queried with LINQ. I am really hoping this eliminates CAML queries, however I did see in the Client Object Model demo, that they still used a CAML query there. Since I brought up the Client OM, I’ll mention that there is a client object model available now for SharePoint which will make things like integrating with Silverlight very easy.

Unfortunately, they haven’t really produced any information about the changes in Search yet. I am looking forward to hearing most about those. Hopefully, they completely scrapped the Search Center and started over. I am wondering if there are any changes in the Records Center too. I also wonder how this will affect partners that have built tools around MOSS 2007. I can see Lightning Tools BDC Meta Man and AvePoint being directly affected. However, I am sure there will still be new areas for these companies to explore with the new product. This is an exciting time and I can’t wait for the public beta and to hear more about the product. Unfortunately, it’s not looking like I will make it to the SharePoint Conference this year, so I will have to be getting a lot of information second hand.

On a related note, don’t forget about the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group tonight.

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