As I said in one of the previous posts, BCS is one of these new technologies that will really matter and have their influence on SharePoint as a whole.
In this post I will tell you some more details about this so you can get a more complete picture of this fine piece of technology.
Everything starts by creating a new external content type in SharePoint Designer 2010. This will make a connection to an external data source and here you can do a mapping between you SharePoint metadata and the metadata available in the external system.
This external content type can then be used in an external list from where users can work with the data as if it was stored in SharePoint itself. It's good to know that the external data is never stored in the content database.
You must also keep in mind that an external list is not a regular SharePoint list. There are certain things you just can't do with it. Events will not be triggered so no event handlers possible. No RSS feeds, no 'export to spreadsheet', no 'edit in datasheet view', no REST, no default fields are available like 'title' or 'created', no workflows, item level security happens on the external datasource, not in SharePoint.
What's also new is the external data column so you can use data from an external content type in a standard SharePoint list. This allows you to, for example, use external metadata in your document templates by integrating them as quick parts.
As you can see this BCS is something you can play around with for weeks. Therefor I will let everybody know they will not see me until Christmas :) .
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten