Part 3: Creating an Association between External Content Types for BDC

In Part 3 of our series on creating a model for the BDC service that returns information about contacts in a sample database, we will walk through the process of creating an association between External Content Types for BDC through SharePoint Designer 2013.

Step 1: Right-click on the second table which was created in Part 2 and select the New Association menu:

If desired, rename the Association Name or Association Display Name.  Once complete, click the Browse button to select the Parent table (which the second table needs to refer to):

Next, select the reference field for the right combo box for the appropriate option.

Click Next to continue.

Step 2: Select the reference key and check on the Map to Identifier checkbox as pictured in the example below:

Click Next to continue.

Step 3:  To complete the process, click Save in SharePoint Designer:

At this point, you should have two tables (parent table and child table) displayed on the pane on the left side of the program.

Upon completing the above steps, verify that your BDC services configuration was successful going to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage service applications -> Business Data Connectivity Service.

Check out the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Generating a New Key for Using BDC on a Portal Site
• Part 2: Connecting to a Portal Site and Creating BDC
• Part 4: Setting Permissions for Your BDC and Data-Viewer Web Part Integration