The Business Data Catalog has promoted as being a method to display your information easily in SharePoint. As soon as you start displaying the information, your users will start to want to edit and insert new records. There are three ways to achieve this goal:
1, Build InfoPath 2007 forms to write back
2, Link to an existing asp.net or third party application
3, Generate the insert and update statements in BDC Meta Man and user SharePoint Web Parts.
This article will focus on number 3 – generating the web parts.
But the Business Data Catalog is ReadOnly?
When you define your application definition file you are telling the BDC how it can get your data by either executing a Select statement or a stored procedure. There is no reason why instead of doing a Select statement you execute an Insert or Update statement, passing in the values you want to Insert/Update as BDC parameters.
We’ve done some work on BDC Meta Man to do all of this for you! If you right click on a BDC entity when it is placed on the design surface you’ll get to the entity management screen. The fourth tab along will allow you to select the fields that you want to be able to insert or update!
As well as having an application definition file that contains the Insert and Update statements you need, you are also going to need some web parts for your users to fill in the values. BDC Meta Man not only generates the ADF file for you, but also a c# project that contains all the code you need for your web parts to work! Simply add a .snk file and away you can go with your web parts.
One deployed you will need to configure your web parts on a page and link it all together using BDC actions.
We’ve created a screencast of the process working from beginning to end. Please click here to view it.
If you have any questions about the information here please do not hesitate to contact us:
support@lightningtools.com
