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Everything You Need to Know about BDC: Part 1 of 8

Started by Arno Nel (SharePoint Magazine) · 8 months ago

Welcome to the first of an eight part series on the Business Data Catalog (BDC).  While BDC is an enormously powerful tool, it’s also fairly complex and not well understood.  This series is considered technical in nature and intended for SharePoint installers, administra ... Continue reading »

10 comments

  • Steve Gaitten

    7 months ago

    Randy,

    Nice job on the intro to BDC, I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

    I would also recommend that anyone who is interested in the BDC should take a few minutes to learn about MashPoint from Bamboo Solutions. [http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/mashpoint/default.aspx] MashPoint is a free platform from Bamboo, modeled on the BDC. MashPoint has virtually all the capabilities of MashPoint and more and is available for both MOSS and WSS.

    It's also worth mentioning that Bamboo's complete gallery of over 40 SharePoint Web Parts is currently being updated so that all relevant Web Parts can be configured to display data directly from the BDC or MashPoint. The first two Bamboo products to support these data sources are the Calendar Plus Web Part and the Chart Plus Web Part. These two Web Parts are great ways to visualize a BDC or MashPoint connected data source. In the coming days, we will issue updates to Data-Viewer Web Part enabling configurable datasheet views of external data sources, and many other popular Bamboo products.

    ;) -S
    reply
  • Randy Williams

    7 months ago

    Hi Steve,

    I considered mentioning MashPoint here, but opted to keep it out. Thanks for putting in a plug for it. :)
    reply
  • Stephen Hughes

    7 months ago

    Brilliant topic, I was in a positoin a few months ago trying to figure out how to use the BDC. After much pain I have been able to work my way through it with help froma couple of sites. This topic will be a great help to all those trying to understand the BDC.

    Look forward to Part 2
    reply
  • Fred H

    7 months ago

    Randy,
    Great intro. I look forward to the remainder of your series very much!

    If I could wish for one thing from your Part 2 article on AD files it would be for some valuable explanation and tip on how to taylor stored procedures to fit within the BDC framework. I understand that you have to write seperate procs for the Finder method and Specific Finder method but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how make that work, practically, when adapting an existing business proc that doesn't really require this delineation-other than for the BDC.
    reply
  • Randy Williams

    7 months ago

    Hi Fred,

    Article 2 has been written already and should be published shortly. I think I provide pretty good guidance on how both a stored procedure and an ad hoc select statement would work in the context of a finder/specific finder/IdEnumerator methods. Let me know what you think when it comes out. If I missed something, let me know, and I'll try to fill it in.
    reply
  • markus

    4 months ago

    HI All,
    I have created a webpart which has 3 fields. One of the field will be provided by a BDC which has already created. Can you show me how to add a BDC into a webpart programmatically.

    Thanks,
    Markus
    reply
  • jabailo

    2 months ago

    If the Sharepoint database is remote from the Sharepoint web server (MOSS07), then does the LOB need connectivity (port 1433 for SQL Server) to the web server (farm) or database server.
    reply
  • Randy Williams

    2 months ago

    Hi,

    If you're using TCP/IP sockets as your network protocol for SQL Server, then you will need to make sure that your web server can deliver TCP 1433 (and 1434, I think) packets to SQL. In this way, your SharePoint web server (or web front end as we say) is the client to SQL Server. Hope this helps answer.
    reply
  • jabailo

    2 months ago

    That makes it clear, thank you!

    I'm working on a farm that has two web servers. The 01 server doesn't have 1433 and the 02 server does. I set up my web parts BDC list page on 01. I am guessing then that I need to build on the 02 server...wonder if there's an easy way to transfer my web parts page to run via the 02 server (?)
    reply
  • Randy Williams

    2 months ago

    If both 01 and 02 servers are part of the same farm as web front ends (WFE), there's no need to transfer web parts between the servers. This is handled automatically (although I do assume that you have some type of network load-balancer in place) since both servers share the same configuration and content. You will want to make sure both servers can connect to the SQL Server for the BDC web parts to render. You might find this other blog post I wrote helpful when troubleshooting connections to SQL Server: http://www.synergyonline.com/blog/blog-moss/Lis...
    reply

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