Part 2: Connecting to a portal site and creating BDC

In Part 2 of our series on creating a model for the BDC service that returns information about contacts in a sample database, we will walk you through the process of connecting to a portal site and creating BDC.

This process can be accomplished taking the following steps:

Step 1: Open the Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2013 program.

Step 2: Go to the Sites tab and select the Open Site icon.

Enter the URL of the portal site you need to use BDC with into the dialog:

When prompted, enter your user name and password into the Windows Security to access your portal site.

Step 3: Go to the External Content Types tab and click on the External Content Type menu to connect to the SQL program:

Click on the Add Connection button on the form, and make sure that you created the Northwind database on your SQL program.

Select the SQL Server option.

When prompted, input the information regarding Database Server, Database Name, and the Key which was created in Part 1 into the SQL Server Connection dialog as shown in the following example:

Step 4: Select a table which you want to make a parent table. Right-click on the applicable table and select the Create All Operations menu:

Click Next to continue:

 

Select the column which differs from the primary key and check on the Show in Picker checkbox. Click Next to continue:

Click Finish to complete:

Click on Save to save your completed work.

You can verify that the table was created correctly looking for the name of the table in the left hand column of the form in the SharePoint Designer program as shown in the following example:

Step 5: Exit SharePoint Designer

Step 6: Re-open the SharePoint Designer program

Once opened, select the table which you want to make a child table. Make sure that the selected table has a reference key which refers to the primary key of the parent table.

Next, right-click on the identified child table and select the Create All Operations menu:

 

Select the column which differs from the primary key and check the Show in Picker checkbox. Click Next to continue:

 

Click Finish to complete.

Check out the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Generating a New Key for Using BDC on a Portal Site
• Part 3: Creating an Association between External Content Types for BDC
• Part 4: Setting Permissions for Your BDC and Data-Viewer Web Part Integration

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