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SharePoint 2010 : Building Composite Solutions (part 1) - External Lists, External Data Columns

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11/26/2012 4:07:41 PM
Now that you have configured the BCS application, created and imported BDC Models, and created actions, building composite solutions and aggregating data from external systems on dashboards is a relatively easy process, if you understand your business data and the data users need to see. You can use the browser or SharePoint Designer, or you can use External Lists and External Data Columns, or if you have SharePoint 2010, you can use the External Data Web Parts. You can then exploit the default behavior of Web Parts, lists, and libraries, such as defining an audience, targeting, filtering, and using Web Part connections.

1. External Lists

You create External Lists using the browser, SharePoint Designer, Windows PowerShell, or code. When you have created these lists, you will find that they have similar functionally to other SharePoint lists you are familiar with; however, you cannot associate RSS feeds to External Lists. There is also no datasheet view, nor can you bind workflows to the data, because the data is not in SharePoint, so you can’t trigger workflows on data changes. However, using SharePoint Designer, you can create a site, list, or reusable workflow that accesses one or more External Lists.

To create an External List using the browser, complete the following tasks.

  1. Open the site where you want to create the External List.

  2. Click Site Actions and then select More Options.

  3. On the Create page, click External List.


    Note:

    If you have a large number of list types, you will find the External List option if you filter by List and Data categories.


  4. On the New page, enter the name and description of the list and then select whether you want to create a link to this list in the Quick Launch bar. To the right of the External Content Type text box, click the Select External Content Type icon, as shown in Figure 1.

    Figure 1. New External List – Select External Content Type icon

  5. The External Content Type Picker dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2. Select the ECT, which defines the external system that you want to display in your External List, and then click OK.

    Figure 2. External Content Type picker

  6. On the New page, click Create.

2. Business Data Web Parts

SharePoint 2010 ships with seven generic external data Web Parts, six of which are functionally the same as they were for the Business Data Web Parts in SharePoint Server 2007. The seventh is a new Web Part—the Chart Web Part. These Web Parts can be used to display any ECT from the BCS without writing any code. After they are configured, they will automatically be named after the entity data they are displaying. The Web Parts that display data from the LOB systems query the metadata cached on each Web front-end server, and then the instance data is retrieved from the data source.

To use the Business Data Web Parts on a site, you must activate the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features at the site collection level. 

3. External Data Columns

An External Data Column allows you to add data from an ECT to a standard SharePoint list. In SharePoint Server 2007, these were referred to as Business Data columns. If an External Data Column is added to a document library, then they can be made available as content controls in Word 2010.

To add a business data column to a list, complete the following tasks.

  1. Navigate to the list or library where you want to add the column.

  2. To display the Ribbon, click List within List Tools and then click Create Column in the Manage Views group to display the Create Column dialog box.

  3. In the Name And Type section, enter a column name and select the External Data type. This column type can hold any ECT. The dialog box redisplays, and you will now see Check and Select ECT icons in the Additional Column Settings section.

  4. Click the Select External Content Type icon to display the External Content Type Picker dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. Choose the appropriate ECT and click OK. The dialog box closes, and you will see that the Additional Column Settings section contains a list of properties associated with this entity, as shown in Figure 18-23.

  5. From the Select The Field To Be Shown On This Column drop-down list, select a field and then click any related data you want to display. For example, you might choose to display a customer’s name with the customer’s business address and phone number. You can select the Add To All Content Types option and the Add To Default View option to add the column and additional fields to the default view.

  6. Click OK.

Figure 3. External Data type additional column settings


Now when you add a new list item, you can use the External Data Select icon to display the Choose External Data dialog box. Up to this point, SharePoint 2010 used the BDC administrator object model to retrieve the information from the cached metadata held in the Web front-end server. When the list is displayed, the BDC runtime object model connects to the external data source, and it copies the data into the list, unlike the external data Web Parts, which contain only a link to the external data. To update the data in the list, you can click the Refresh icon to the right of the External Data Column name. A Web page is displayed that warns you that this operation could take a long time. If you click Yes, the data source is contacted to return the necessary data. By copying the business data in the list, the business data within the list has inherited all list type operations, such as view and filter.
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