We have been busy for the last couple of weeks adding some new functionality to BCS Meta Man to give our users the best tool for generating SharePoint Business Connectivity Service (BCS) Models that we can.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and BCS
We have made some great improvements around building your BCS Model using Web Services – whether it is a WCF or ASMX service we’ve got it covered. In this release we made it easier to add the service using the ‘Add Service Reference’ dialog as well as adding support for two more method types. We now support for web services the following method types:
- Finder Method
- Specific Finder Method
- IdEnumerator Method
- *NEW!* Creator Method
- *NEW!* Updator Method
This is great news if you want to use the full Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) functionality of the External List.
If you want to create an association between two External Content Types based on Service Methods you can now do this too via our simple to use drag and drop user interface.
Stored Procedures
We made a few changes around using Stored Procedures to build an External Content Type to make it more stable. Just like the Service Methods you can create an External Content Type by adding a Finder, Specific Finder, IdEnumerator, Creator and Updater method.
Version Number fix
We did have a few customers who experienced an issue after upgrading BCS Meta Man to the previous version. Users were unable to open a model they had previously created. The issue was occurring because the version number of the *.diagram file was the old version number and when BCS Meta Man tried to load the diagram file a check within our code to make sure it was valid was only checking if it matched the current version, this has now been fixed.
More Information
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