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Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013 : Adding a Business Data Connectivity Model to Office 365 SharePoint Online

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Before looking into what’s new in BCS for SharePoint 2013, let’s do a quick level-set on the external content type (ECT), a key component in Business Connectivity Services. The ECT is metadata that describes the connection information, methods (create, read, update, delete) that can be performed against the connection, data definitions for data elements, and any parameters that might pass between the client and external LOB data source. Security permissions can be set on the ECT to allow access by specific users or groups, and a wide array of authentication methods are supported, including Windows, claims-based, username and password, and certificate. ECTs serve as the basis for external lists. Unlike other lists in SharePoint that have their data stored in the SharePoint content database, external lists retrieve their data from the LOB data source every time the list is accessed by a user or programmatically. Therefore, external lists bring real-time data to SharePoint stakeholders. ECTs can also be made available to SharePoint search for indexing, and the LOB system data is included in a user’s search result, trimmed by permissions.

A significant benefit of BCS is that it can provide a central location where IT manages a consistent approach for accessing LOB systems. By investing in building ECTs on a common infrastructure that surfaces LOB information in a usable and reusable form, business users, power users, and developers alike can become consumers of data served up by the ECTs in a variety of contexts. These range from configuring a dashboard of business data Web parts on a page, to configuring document templates for Word to include business data columns, to developers building custom enterprise solutions. Also, the developer’s’ programming pattern is consistent when building against ECTs because no matter what the LOB system is, they code exactly the same way against the ECT to retrieve or update the data. Because IT also builds the ECTs, it can ensure the efficiency of the ECT by defining the filters and throttling limits on the accesses to the back-end systems.

External content types were broadly welcomed in SharePoint 2010, and Microsoft built on the ECT foundation in SharePoint 2013 by providing new capabilities. Figure 1 shows the various BCS components and highlights the primary Microsoft BCS investments in this release.

FIGURE 1

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In the connector framework, alongside the already-popular SQL, WCF, and .NET connectors, the new highly requested OData connector joins the ranks. With the proliferation of OData producers, services that expose their data using the OData protocol, this new class of data services is now available for your BCS solutions.

With the new app model for SharePoint, where apps have a particular scope upon install into SharePoint, BCS now has app-scoped ECTs, too. In other words, an ECT can be created for and deployed within the scope of the app upon install. Typically, where an ECT has a farm-level, on-premises, or tenant-wide scope in Office 365, your app for SharePoint can have ECTs in your solution that run isolated within the app boundaries.

Another much-desired capability for BCS external lists was to have REST support for accessing them. This feature, too, was a significant investment by Microsoft to make the BCS data available via REST, but it has done so while also making meaningful contributions in the CSOM for accessing BCS data.

Microsoft also made significant investments in this release to support alerts and event receivers on external lists; both highly requested features by users and developers. Users can now create alerts in external lists in the same way they do on other SharePoint lists. Event receivers have been available on SharePoint artifacts for some time, but now BCS is a first-class citizen in the event infrastructure. For SharePoint to be notified that data has changed on an external list, configuration both on SharePoint and the external data source is required. The data source needs a way to become aware of underlying data changes; for example, SQL triggers or a service that periodically polls the data source to detect changes. It also needs a way for SharePoint to subscribe to it to receive notification of changes. SharePoint now has the infrastructure to support this interaction and provides a way to register this “notification channel” through an extension to the BDC model schema to include the new EventSubscriber and EventUnsubscriber stereotypes. At a high level, the communication flow for SharePoint to subscribe to be notified when there is a data change on the external system works like this: when the Subscribe method is called on the ECT associated with an external system, the Subscribe method passes the event type and delivery address to the external system. The external system records this information in a database and then returns a subscription ID to SharePoint. When the Subscribe method completes, notification of a data change can be sent from the external system to the delivery address REST endpoint on SharePoint. Receipt of the notification, in turn, fires an event on the external list and calls into your remote event receiver. Please refer to MSDN for full documentation on this subject.

Of the numerous Microsoft investments for BCS in 2013, let’s first take a look at setting up an ECT that connects to an OData service. You will use Office 365 SharePoint Online in this Try It Out since it supports Business Connectivity Services.


TRY IT OUT: Adding a Business Data Connectivity Model to Office 365 SharePoint Online (Employee.bdcm)

In this exercise you upload a Business Data Connectivity Model (BDCM) file to Office 365 SharePoint Online that defines an OData connection to the OData Northwind service endpoint available on Odata.org. After the external content type is created you then create an external list in a site collection of your choice. This ECT is available tenancy wide. For this exercise you will need an Office 365 Developer Site or an Office 365 Enterprise Preview trial. Visit either http://on both dev.office.com to sign up for a Developer Site or http://on both office.com/preview for an Office 365 Enterprise Preview trial.

1. Log in to the Office 365 portal.microsoftonline.com site using an account with administrative rights on the tenancy.

2. From the Dashboard page, click Service Settings.

3. On the Service Settings page, click Sites.

4. On the Sites page, click the link following the question, “Don’t see what you are looking for?”

5. On the SharePoint Administration Center page, click BCS.

6. On the BCS page, click Manage BDC Models and External Content Types. (In an on-premises installation you would use the SharePoint Central Administration portal and navigate to Application Management ⇒ Manage service applications and Business Connectivity Service.)

7. Click the Import icon in the ribbon and browse to the Employee.bdcm file . Click Open and click Import. The BDCM file will be validated on import; when it has successfully completed, click OK. (If you do not have permissions to import, click Set Metadata Store Permissions and make sure you have administrator-level permissions on the Metadata store.)

8. In the ribbon, click the drop-down list to select different views of the BDC Metadata Store and select BDC Models. Click the NorthwindModel check box, and as shown in Figure 2, click the Set Object Permissions button in the ribbon.

FIGURE 2

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9. Browse the directory to find and select your user account, and then click the Add button. While your user account is selected in the lower window, click all the check boxes under Permissions to enable the full set of permissions, and then click OK. This gives your account full rights to manage the BDC Model.

10. In the ribbon, click the drop-down list to select different views of the BDC Metadata Store and select External Content Types. Click the Employee check box and click the Set Object Permissions button in the ribbon.

11. Browse the directory to find and select your user account, and then click the Add button. While your user account is selected in the lower window, click all the check boxes under Permissions to enable the full set of permissions for your account to access and manage the ECT. Click the check box to Propagate permissions to all methods and click OK.

12. Navigate to any site collection in your Office 365 tenancy where you want to create an external list for the ECT. When in the site collection, click Site Contents and select Add an app.

13. Scroll through the apps until you can see the External List tile as shown in Figure 3. Click it to add an External List.

FIGURE 3

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14. In the Adding External List dialog, enter Northwind Employees for the name and click the Select External Content Type icon.

15. In the External Content Type Picker, select the Employee external content type, click OK and the result should look like Figure 4. Then click Create.

FIGURE 4

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16. On the Site Contents page scroll until you see the new Northwind Employees app. Click the tile to open the external list. Additionally, a link to the Northwind Employees external list has been added in the left navigation bar under Lists. The completed external list should look something like Figure 5.

FIGURE 5

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How It Works
In this example, the .bdcm file was already created for you to simply see the pattern for how to wire up the model in the administration portal. This is one pattern you can follow if you already have ECTs in your SharePoint 2010 environment and you want to move them to your 2013 environment. You can export them from 2010 and import them into 2013. For Office 365 SharePoint Online, only BDCMs that are SOAP-based or OData-based connections are supported — no .NET or ADO.NET (SQL direct connections) can be used in SharePoint Online. Also, the SOAP and OData ECTs can only use group-based permissions with authentication managed via the Secure Store Service (SSS).

If you navigate to the Employee.bdcm provided and open it in Notepad or any XML editor, you can view the XML document structure. Following are a few of the high-level elements with which you should be familiar:

  • LobSystem: This describes the type of connection (DotNetAssembly, Database, Webservice, or OData) to the external data source.
  • LobSystemInstance: This describes the specific implementation of the LobSystem; with this element you can see the metadata describing the service URL endpoint and data format.
  • Entity: This describes the business entity or object. It contains both Methods and data definitions described in a collection of Parameters.
  • Method: This represents the read-write capabilities for the Entity. At a minimum a method of the type SpecificFinder that will return one item, and a Finder that will return all items must exist. These two methods are required for an ECT. Methods of the type Updater, Deleter, and Creator are optional depending on whether your external data source allows them. Or even if the external data source does have methods available beyond Finder and SpecificFinder, you choose which methods you want to implement in your ECT. Through the ECT creation process using the SharePoint Designer wizard or in Visual Studio, you create the mappings for the methods you want to expose in your ECT to the corresponding methods in the external data source. Lastly, methods can be scoped using a FilterDescriptor.
  • Parameter: This describes the data elements that will flow to and from the external system.
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