BDC Meta Man - Connecting and displaying two Entities with an association

5/2/2008 8:28 AM

Aim:

Create two Entities with an association and display on Business Data List and Business Related List

Expected Result to achieve a pass:

User should be able to:

• Use the Business Data List Web Part
• Use the Business Data Related List Web Part

Steps to take:

1. Open BDC Meta Man
2. Choose ‘SQL Server’ Enter your connection details, click connect
3. Expand your Database from the top left to view its tables

4. Drag your first table to the design surface; we are going to be using the tblEmployee table

5. Right Click on your Entity, and Choose Edit Entity, on the Entity Management screen select a column from the drop down box to use as the Title column (see step 15 for where this will be used)
6. Drag your second table onto the Design Surface; we are going to be using the tblPhoneNumbers table

7. On the Design Surface, Drag from your Source Entity to your Destination Entity, making sure you connect the columns which will form your association.
8. Your Design Surface should look like the following now and is ready to generate the Application Definition File and import into SharePoint

9. Set the output path to be c:\appdef.xml from the Configuration Options
10. Generate XML
11. Import into MOSS Shared Service Provider
12. 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 Employee data, and the Related List Web Part to the Phone Number data.
13. Create your connections between the two Web Parts

14. You can test to see if this is working correctly by clicking the radio button next to a Employee and the Phone Number list will display the Phone Numbers of that Employee

15. 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 4, click this to take you to the profile page.

Profile Page: