Creating Associations between External Content Types

In this walkthrough we will show how to create by Meta Man associations between External Content Types. We will consider an example for MS SQL but the same way you may work with any other data source supported by Meta Man.

Prerequisites:
- SharePoint Server 2013
- Meta Man (it doesn’t necessarily need to be installed on the SharePoint server but it requires .net Framework 4.5 installed on the machine where you are going to run Meta Man from)
- MS SQL server with any sample database (for this walk through we are going to use the NorthWind sample database )
- Two related (“one-to-many”) tables in the external data source
Open Meta Man and choose to connect to a SQL Server data source. Select or enter the database name you wish to work with and press arrow in order to connect to selected database.
Upon successfully connecting to SQL Server you’ll see another window. In order to get a list of tables click “Tables” item in the list on the left pane. Now we can see listed all the tables for this particular database.
We will be working with two related tables “Territories” and “Region”, to add them to the Model, at first just drag “Territories” onto the “Diagram”
When you drop the table you will be shown the following dialog, which allows to configure the external content type before creation. In this example we’ll accept all default values and click “Create” button.
You should have the following External Content Type on your Diagram
Now drag and drop another table “Region” onto the diagram. And the same way add it to the Model. You should now have 2 External Content Types on the diagram
Now we are going to add the association. Move mouse over “Region” External Content Type and click on any square point appeared around External Content Type
and drag to the square point appeared around “Territories” External Content Type
When you release the “Association Properties” dialog will show. Select the fields from combo boxes that provide Primary Key->Foreign Key functionality, tick “Use BCS Picker for foreign keys” check box and click “Create”
The diagram will update to show an arrow indicating we have an association between the two External Content Types. Now simply click “Generate” button and your BDC model file will get generated.
Now we need to import our BDC model file. Open up SharePoint 2013 Central Administration. Navigate to Manage Service Application->Business Data Connectivity Service. Click “Import” button on the ribbon.
Use the browser button to locate our BDC model file, or type in the path and filename yourself. Leave all the other options as they are for the time being, and click “Import”
SharePoint 2013 will now go through and validate your BDC model file is correct, once it is done you will get a success page.
Browse to the SharePoint page where you want to add the 2 Business Data web parts. Add a new Business Data List Web Part to this SharePoint page.
Click on the “Open the tool pane” link
Click on the icon to show the available External Content Types
Select our “Northwind_MetaMan.Region” External Content Type, click “OK”. Click “OK” on the tool pane then.
The external data from Region table is now displayed in the SharePoint Web Part
Next, Add a new “Business Data Related List” Web Part to the page
Configure the Web Part to use the “Northwind_MetaMan.Territories” External Content Type. The Web Part will display a message saying the following
Now we should set up the connection using the small arrow from the top right of our Web Part
Once this is done we can click on the arrows next to an item in our “Region” web part and the territories related to this region will display in our “Territories” web part