MOSS BDC - web services and associations
Aim: To create 2 entities with associations from a Web Service
What you will be able to do after this walk through
• Use BDC Meta Man to create an Application Definition File from an existing BDC Web Service
• Use the Business Data List Web Part and the Business Data Related List Web Part with our BDC Web Service
Steps to take:
1. Open BDC Meta Man
2. Choose ‘Web Service’
Enter the address of your web service including “?wsdl” on the end
ie. http://sharepoint:1234/bdcwebservice.asmx?wsdl
and click connect
3. Drag and drop your Finder Method onto the design surface
4. Choose ‘Yes’ on the dialog box which appears to create your entity
5. Give your entity a meaningful name. i.e. Employees
6. Choose the Finder as the method type and click create. You should have something like the following:
7. Right click on your new entity and choose ‘Edit Entity’, Select a column from the ‘Title Column’ drop down list which you want to link to the item profile, click save. (used in step 35)
8. Drag and drop your Specific Finder method onto the Design Surface
9. Choose ‘No’ this time from the dialog
10. Choose your existing Entity from the drop down list
11. Choose Specific Finder as your Method Type, click Add
12. Select your unique identifier from the available columns, click OK
13. Next, From the drop down list pick the parameter used by the specific finder method, click OK
14. Drag your ID Enumerator Method onto the Design Surface
15. Click ‘No’ to the dialog box
16. Choose your existing Entity from the drop down list
17. Choose ID Enumerator as your Method Type, click Add
18. Select what will be returned from the method from the drop down list, click OK
19. Your design surface should now look like the following
20. Next we need to add our second Entity, in our example Department.
21. Follow steps 4 – 18 with your second Entities methods, don’t forget you will need to click ‘Yes’ when you add your Finder method to the Design Surface to ‘create a new web service entity’ and ‘No’ for the when you add the ‘Specific Finder’ and ‘ID Enumerator’ methods as they should be added
to the newly created entity.
22. Once you have added your second Entity, your Design Surface should look as follows:
23. Next we want to create our association between the two entities
24. On the Design Surface, Drag from your Source Entity to your Destination Entity – it does not matter exactly where on the entity you drag to and from.
25. On the dialog box which pops up choose your association method, click select
26. Choose the parameter which will be sent from your Source Entity to your Destination Entity, click OK.
27. Your Design Surface should look like the following now and is ready to generate the Application Definition File and import into SharePoint
28. Set the output path to be c:/appdef.xml from the Configuration Options
29. Generate XML
30. Import into MOSS Shared Service Provider
31. Add BDC application as a search content source and set a full crawl going.
32. Open up SharePoint site; add a BDC Data List Web Part, and a Business Data Related Web Part. Set the BDC Data list to our Department data, and the Related List Web Part to the Employee data.
33. Create your connections between the two Web Parts
34. You can test to see if this is working correctly by clicking the radio button next to a department and the Employee list will display the Employees of that Department
35. One of the columns for you items will be linked to the profile page, this column will be the one you set up in step 7, click this to take you to the profile page.
Profile Page:
