BDC Meta Man - Connecting to a Web Service using blank entities and adding 3 actions

5/7/2008 10:33 AM

Aim: 

To create an 2 entities with associations from a Web Service with 3 actions (Predefined action with 1 parameter, predefined with 2 parameters and a custom action) 

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 

·         View the profile page 

·         Execute actions 

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.  Right Click on the Employee Entitiy 

29.  On the Entity tab, Change the Title Column to ‘FirstName’ from the drop down. 

30.  Navigate to the Actions Tab 

31.  Click ‘Add Predefined Action’, Choose Email as the action and then click Select

32.  On the next screen, Highlight the action, click Add, choose our Email column as the parameter and click OK
 

33.  Highlight the EmployeeID Action Parameter and click Remove 

34.  Add another Predefined Action, this time choose ‘MSN Search’ 

35.  Highlight the new action, add the First Name and Last Name columns as Action Parameters and again remove the EmployeeID. 

36.  Next we need to manually amend the url to the following: http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q={0}+{1} 

37.  Click ‘Create Custom Action’ 

38.  Fill in the details for your custom action, click Save
 

39.  Click Save again
 

40.  Set the output path to be c:\appdef.xml from the Configuration Options 

41.  Generate XML 

42.  Import into MOSS Shared Service Provider 

43.  Add BDC application as a search content source and set a full crawl going. 

44.  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. 

45.  Create your connections between the two Web Parts
 

46.  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
 

47.  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 and our actions. 
   

Profile Page:  

Email Action:
 

MSN Search: 

Employee Search: