SharePoint 2010 : Building Composite Solutions (part 2) - External Data Search, External Data and User Profiles

11/26/2012 4:08:55 PM

4. External Data Search

The BCS comes with search indexing connectors that enable SharePoint 2010 to index and provide full-text searches of the external systems. In fact, SharePoint Server search uses BCS search indexing connectors to index Exchange public folders, Lotus Notes, and Documentuum, among others. In SharePoint 2010, the BCS search improvements include the indexing of BLOBs, so that users can now search for attachments; it also now supports incremental crawls and item level security. However, importing a BDC Model that defines an ECT does not make the external data automatically available within Search. The metadata must have defined an IDEnumerator method, which is used in conjunction with the SpecificFinder method to return data from the data source. Then you must configure Enterprise Search to search the business data. The following sections explain how you configure Enterprise Search to search the business data, a process that consists of three steps.

Add a content source.
Map crawled properties.
Optionally, create a search scope, customized search pages, custom search queries, or all three.

4.1. Adding a Content Source

To include the content from a data source in the Enterprise Search, you must create content sources. For each content source, you have the choice of creating a content source for all the data defined in the BDC, for each LOB system, or for a combination of LOB systems. To create a content source for business data, complete the following steps.

Open a browser and go to the SharePoint Central Administration website.
Under Application Management, click Manage Service Applications.
On the Service Applications page, click the name of Search Service Application (SSA) that you want to index the external system.
On the Search Administration page, under Crawling, click Content Sources in the left navigation pane to display the Manage Content Sources page.
Click New Content Source, type a name, and then in the Content Source Type section, click Line Of Business Data. The Add Content Source page refreshes and a drop-down list is populated with BCS applications and a list of all external systems for the selected BCS application is displayed, similar to the list shown in Figure 4.
You can set the crawl schedules for the incremental and full crawls at content source creation time or later. Incremental crawls are only possible if a LastModifiedDate property is one of the return fields in a SpecificFinder method for an entity. Similarly, you can start a full crawl immediately.
Click OK, and then if you haven’t already done so, complete a full crawl.

Figure 4. Adding a line-of-business (LOB) content source

Note:

SECURITY ALERT Ensure that the identity used to index the external system has the necessary permissions.

4.2. Mapping Crawled Properties

In SharePoint 2010, the Enterprise Search feature is able to discover new properties, known as “crawled properties.” To make a crawled property available to a user, you need to make sure it is included in the search index and mapped to a metadata property as detailed in the following steps.

Wait for a full crawl to complete on the new content source, and then on the Search Administration page, under Queries and Results, click Metadata Properties.
Click Crawled Properties and then click Categories to display the Categories page. If this is the first time you have crawled a business data content source, the Number Of Properties column for the Business Data category should not be zero if the crawl process was successful, your BDC Model was correctly defined, and the search index identity had the correct permissions.
Click the Business Data link in the Category Name column to display the Crawled Properties – Business Data page.
For each ECT that has an IDEnumerator method, there will be at least one property name for each TypeDescriptor defined in the SpecificFinder method. Any property that has a Yes in the Mapped To Content column is already included in the search index. The default configuration, which you can amend, is to include only text properties in the search index.
To include a property in the search index—for example, one of the non-text properties—click the property name in the Property Name column. In the Mappings To Managed Properties section of the Edit Crawled Property page, select the Include Values For This Property In The Search Index option and then click OK.
To map a crawled property, you can choose an existing managed property or create a new one. It is likely you will choose to create a new managed property as follows.
1. In the left navigation pane, click Metadata Properties, and then on the Metadata Property Mappings page, click New Managed Property. The New Managed Property Web page is displayed.
2. In the Name And Type section, enter a name in the Property Name text box and select a type of information for the property.
3. In the Mappings To Crawled Properties section, click Add Mapping. The Crawled Property Selection dialog is displayed.
4. In the Select A Category drop-down list, select Business Data. This dialog box will show only properties that are of the specified type and included in the index. If the number of properties available is greater than the dialog box can display, you will see a yellow arrow icon, which you can use to scroll through the properties, or alternatively, you can use the Find feature.
5. Select the required property and then click OK. The dialog box closes, and the crawled property appears in the text box.
6. Select the Allow This Property To Be Used In Scopes option to make the property available for use in defining search scopes.
7. Click OK, and repeat this procedure for each crawled property you need to map to a metadata property.
In the left navigation pane, click Content Sources. For the appropriate content source you created, select Start Full Crawl from the drop-down list.

After you have completed steps 1 and 2, you should be able to find data from the external data sources. The search results page provides links to the entity’s profile page.

4.3. Customizing the End-User Experience

If you want users to limit the search for keywords to a specific business data source, you can create a search scope with a rule that specifies the content source you created. You could also create a new tab in the Search Center to display the search results associated with this content source.

5. External Data and User Profiles

By default, SharePoint 2010 can import a list of domain users from the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server, IBM Tivoli Directory Server (ITDS), Novell eDirectory, Sun Java System Directory Server, or external systems. To add a user profile import based on the data from external systems, complete the following process.

The use of the data from external systems with user profiles is a two-step process.

Import data from the external system into the profile database using the ECT defined in the BDC Model.
Map the profile properties to the external data.

To import data from an external system into the profile database, follow these steps.

Open a browser and go to the SharePoint Central Administration website.
Under Application Management, click Manage Service Applications.
On the Service Applications page, click the name of the User Profile service application where you want to import the external system data.
Under Synchronization on the Modify Profile Service page, click Configure Synchronization Connections to display the Synchronization Connections page and then click Create New Connection.
On the Add New Synchronization Connection page, enter a name for the connection and select Business Data Connectivity from the Type drop-down list. The page refreshes and you will see ECT Select and Check icons in the Connections Settings section, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. User Profile Import – Create a New Connection page
Click the Select icon to display the External Content Type Picker dialog box (as shown in Figure 18-22 ). Choose the appropriate external data source and click OK to close the dialog box.
Choose either the 1:1 mapping or 1:many mapping connection type.

Real World: Mapping External Data to User Profiles

Use the mapping connection type to map external data source information specific to one user, such as when a SAP system contains a user’s personal details. If your data source returns one row of personal data per user, then use the 1:1 mapping connection. In this situation, you would select the user profile property, such as the AccountName from the Return Items Identified By This Profile Property drop-down list. In the metadata, this information has to map to an Identifier property for the external content type, with a matching SpecificFinder method. Both the user profile property and the identity type must match—for example, they both must be text; one cannot be defined as an integer and the other as a text string. If your data source contains more than one row per user, then use the 1:many mapping connection. From the Filter Items By drop-down list, select the property in the entity that identifies the rows in the data source for a user, and then in the second drop-down list, which is labeled Use This Profile Property As The Filter Value, select the profile property whose value can be used as the filter value.