Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies

Q: SharePoint Guys talking about External list, BCS, etc., which I never heard till SharePoint 2007, what is it?

BCS (Business Connectivity Services) is the successor of BDC (Business Data Catalog), but we have great features available in BCS. Now the data from External systems can be managed as a List in SharePoint and the data operations like create, edit, delete is made possible from the list.

wow…..That’s awesome J

Let’s see step by step creation of External List in SharePoint. In this Example am using SQL Table as External Source.

Open the Site in SharePoint Designer

Click on External Content Types

Click on External Content in Ribbon to create new content type

Specify the values for Name and Display Name, Click on “discover external data sources and define options.”

In the Data Connections Screen, Click on Add Connections

Select the Data Connection type, here I am trying to connect to “Adventure works” SQL Database.

In the next screen specify your connection settings to the database and click OK.

Now the screen will list the database and its tables. Choose the required table and right click to select the operations to be performed on the list.

In Wizard choose the input parameter fields.

In Filters section, you can specify the filter for records.

Now the External Content Field will be looks like below with operations, fields & parameters.

Click on Create Lists & Form for the External Content type in Ribbon.

Specify the list details, if you need to have InfoPath forms for list forms, select “Create InfoPath Form”

Now Set Permission for Business Data Connectivity Services in Central Admin:

Go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications -> Business Data Connectivity Service

Select the Store and Click on Set Metadata store permissions.

Select the User and choose appropriate permissions.

Open the list in site.

Now the data can be accessed from SharePoint list.