As the next part of my Getting Started series, let’s see how we can create external lists - without any coding! Probably you’ve already heard the expressions “external list”, “external content type”, “Business Connectivity Services (BCS)”, etc., but do you really know what they mean? If your answer is yes, fell free to step over the next paragraphs :)
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provides the capability to connect SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 client applications to external data sources. But the BCS gives much more than the former BDC: you can read, write, modify, create, delete data in the LOB system, moreover you can manage the LOB systems’ data as SharePoint 2010 lists. Let’s see how.
Guess what is our tool? Yes, it’s the SharePoint Designer 2010. Open your site, and navigate to the “Entities”: here you can find the list of existing entities on your site, and can define new External Content Types and External Lists. Just click on External Content Type to create a new one, and you immediately get this screen:
If you’ve had data connections defined yet, there are listed in the Data Source Explorer (in the middle of the left column), so you’re able to use them immediately, or you can define new ones. In this Data Source Explorer, you’re able to select tables, views or routines (stored procedures) for your connection. Defining the required operations are very easy: right click on the data source (in my case, it’s my very simple Projects table), and there’s the lift of available operations. You can select the requested ones, or create all of them in one step:
During generating the operations, you can set a lot of other stuff, eg. ID columns, filter criterias, etc. After the needed operations (in my example, all) are generated, they will appear in the External Content Type Operation list, on the right side of your screen.
Go back to the Summary View of our external content type, and give a name to it. Well, to be honest, it’s two names: a friendly display name and a programmatic name. In my example:
OK, save it, and go forward! You can create an external list from the SharePoint Designer 2010 in two ways: in the Entities view, and in the Lists and Libraries view. Also, you can create external lists in your browser, with the general “Create” operation. In my example, I’m creating it with SPD 2010. So click to create an External List, give a name to it (eg. BCS Demo List), assign your freshly created external content type to it, and enjoy!
How do you like it? It’s almost a SharePoint 2010 list with backend-data, displaying for the users in a transparent way.
And at the end, one more surprise. If you’re familiar with WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007, most probably you use a lot of lookup fields, creating links to items in other lists. In SharePoint 2010 lookup fields can get the information even from external lists! Wow? Yes, this is a huge Wow!
For example, let me create a Test list and add a lookup column to it. In this case, I’m able to select my external list with its columns:
Enjoy!
Posted
Nov 12 2009, 12:26 AM
by
aghy