BCS - Business Connectivity Service in SharePoint Server 2010

BCS is the recommended way of integrating external data provided by web services, WCF services, databases, and .NET assemblies into SharePoint and Office client applications.

advantage of working with business data using BCS is that the end user can work with a familiar UI with lists and web parts, the data can be made searchable through SharePoint Search and the user’s security context and credentials can be passed through to the external system.

There are two major tools that allow you to integrate business data using BCS:
(1) Visual Studio 2010 (2) SharePoint Designer 2010

SharePoint Designer 2010

Data Source Type	Description
.NET Type	A custom .NET assembly provides the external data.
SQL Server	A SQL Server database provides the external data
WCF Service	A WCF Service provides the external data.

Office Item Types

Generic List	The external content type will be represented as an external list only and cannot be synced to Outlook 2010.
Appointment	Will be available as an external list and can be synced to Outlook 2010 as an appointment in a calendar folder.
Contact	Will be available as an external list and can be synced to Outlook 2010 as a contact in a contacts folder.
Task	Will be available as an external list and can be synced to Outlook 2010 as a task in a task folder.
Post	Will be available as an external list and can be synced to Outlook 2010 as a post in a mail folder.

Go to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

Under Application Management click the link Manage service applications. This will take you to the Manage service applications page, which lists all the service applications in your SharePoint environment. In the Service Applications page click the Business Data Connectivity Service

link of type Business Data Connectivity Service Application Proxy. This is usually the second Business Data Connectivity Service entry. This will take you to the View External Content Types page In the ribbon of that page click the Set Metadata Store Permissions button to get to the Set Metadata Store Permissions dialog.

·         Edit enables you to edit the security settings for the metadata store. The Set Metadata Store Permissions button will be enabled. You should only select Edit in your development environment

·         Execute enables you to create, read, update, and delete external content type data.

·         Selectable in Clients is needed to create external lists and web parts that use external content types.

·         Set Permissions allows the user to set permissions on any object in the metadata store.

Creating External Content Types Using Visual Studio

Besides targeting different user groups there are 3 other major differences between Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer when it comes to creating external content types.

1) Visual Studio will only allow you to build external content types whose data is provided by .NET assemblies, which basically means that the code written in the assembly serves as a proxy for working with external data. This allows the developer to implement custom security, implement business rules, and aggregate data from different sources.

2) Visual Studio uses a different concept for creating an external content type than SharePoint Designer 2010. SharePoint Designer connects directly to a live SharePoint site and writes the external content type directly in the Business Data Store. Visual Studio creates a model file (*.bdcm file) defining all the external content types. This file gets packaged together with the project output assembly and is eventually deployed as a .WSP file to SharePoint. This is useful if you work within a source control system as you can check in the model file along with your source code.

3) Visual Studio provides a little bit more freedom and functionality with regards to method types, search implementation, and associations.

Notes:
SharePoint Foundation does not support importing WSP files containing BDC models.