SharePoint Saturday New Zealand

1. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for Developers ChakkaradeepChandran SharePoint Server MVP Intergen

2. Agenda BCS Overview BCS Solutions Creating BDC Models Create, Update, Delete More demos…

3. What is BCS? A set of features that provide the capability to connect SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications to any external system: Line-of-Business system (Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, or Siebel) Web 2.0 service Custom home-grown application Provides read/write capabilities to those external systems It provides out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development to deeply integrate external data and services

4. The BIG Picture SharePoint BCS Client Dev Platform Enterprise Search Business Intelligence Collaboration Social Enterprise Content Management External Lists External Content Type Repository Business Data Connectivity Web 2.0 DB WCF Web Service LOB

5. Presentation in SharePoint Business Data Connectivity (BDC) BDC Metadata Store BDC Server Runtime External Lists External Data Columns External Content Type Picker External Item Picker Profile Pages .NET Assembly Connector DB Connector WCF/WS Connector Custom Connector

6. External Content Types Office Clients Describes the schema and data access capabilities of an external data source and its behavior within Office and SharePoint BCS Client Customer FirstName LastName Email GetCustomer() GetCustomers() UpdateCustomer() DeleteCustomer() External Data Source (WebService, DB, .Net object, LOB system, Web 2.0 service, etc.) External Content Type (ECT) *formerly known as BDC Entity SharePoint BCS

7. BCS Tooling Support SharePoint Designer 2010 Visual Studio 2010

8. No Code Vs Custom Code

9. DemoCreating BDC Modelsusing VS2010

10. Manipulating External Lists External List Template Id = 600 Use SPWeb.Lists.Add(name,description,url, SPListDataSource) to create external lists Use the property HasExternalDataSource to check if a List is an External List Build CAML query to retrieve your items You need a Method tag Specify the ViewFields

11. DemoCreating External ListsusingVS2010

12. BCS Limitations Workflows cannot be associated with external lists However, you can use the external data columns and manipulate the external lists in a workflow No RSS feed support for external lists No REST based access for external lists The http://site/_vti_bin/ListData.svc does not support external lists LINQ to SharePoint spmetal.exe does not support external lists Cannot configure alerts for external lists Cannot export external list items to Excel (Export to Excel feature) Item-Level permissions is not available for external lists

13. BCS Limitations Versioning cannot be configured on external lists Item History is not available on external lists Datasheet view cannot be used in external lists XSLT is supported though You cannot create a site column of type ‘External Data Column’ External data columns can be created only as list based columns and cannot be consumed insite level content types No Write support for BLOB You cannot write back to BLOB fields using BCS unless you write your own method You can access BLOB columns by defining a StreamAccessor method and presenting the external data via the BCS Data List web part by checking the Display stream fields property Ratings feature is not supported for external lists Metadata based navigation is not supported for External Lists

14. Thank Youhttp://www.chakkaradeep.comSession Resourceshttp://www.chakkaradeep.com/page/BCS-Session-Resources.aspx

15. Thank you to our Sponsors MSCOMMUNITIES