Jamie Brook, a Senior .NET Developer at the Christchurch office of HP addressed the Christchurch SharePoint User Group meeting tonight, on the topic of the Business Data Catalog (BDC) within SharePoint 2007. There are 18 people here.

This will be an introductory session, and will avoid going into the advanced features. There will be some slides, but most of the session will be a series of demonstrations.

Agenda:
– What is the BDC?
– Design and Security
– The Active Definition File
– OOB Web Parts
– Business Data in Lists
– Search
– What the BDC doesn’t do
– Questions

What is the BDC?
The BDC is a way of integrating data from line of business applications into SharePoint. This means that users can interact with data in other databases and systems from within the SharePoint user interface. It provides a read-only view … there is no change and write back capability.

Jamie sees the key benefit of the BDC as a way of increasing developer productivity.

Design and Security
The BDC sits at a middle level, and uses ADO.NET to get data out of a database, or it can use a Web Service Proxy to get to a Web Service. Once the business data is retrieved, you can use it within the Business Data Web Parts, SharePoint Lists, within Search, and custom solutions, among others.

The BDC makes a live query to the line of business application; it doesn’t cache it.

BDC requires an Enterprise license of MOSS 2007.

Demonstration
Jamie showed the XML file that is used for querying a database. It includes the statements and entities that are of interest, and Jamie was quick to note that Microsoft has provided a graphical user interface for writing these XML files. Jamie’s experience is that this Microsoft tool is a bit buggy, and that BDC Meta Man is “the best tool available for this at the moment” (Jamie says that you should avoid the free, limited version).

The second demonstration was how to use a BDC Web Part in a SharePoint site. Among other things, you can set preferences for sorting and filtering, for removing columns from the view, and more. This is a good no-code way of getting data into the system.

Jamie then shifted on to associating the line of business data with documents in a Document Library. All you have to do is add another column to the library view, make it a business data list, connect to the definition, and choose what data to be linked to in the SharePoint list.

Jamie talked about the BDC being a read-only view of line of business data systems. However, using “Actions”, you can write information back to the database as a work-around.

Things the BDC Doesn’t Do
The BDC isn’t about transactions, workflows, and data transformations.

It does not write data back to the original system; you have to write custom applications to do that.

It requires ADO.NET or SOAP for communication.

And … it requires well composed line of business middleware, or you should use BizTalk.

Questions
1. What are the limits of the data source that you want to call back into the BDC? Probably want to err on the smaller side.
2. Can you make the BDC data go into KPI lists? Jamie believes there is a way to do this.

Closing
Thanks to Matt and Gary for organizing a second great evening for the Christchurch people interested in SharePoint. The next one is tentatively set for March 25.