Comments on: Context in SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services (or the lack of it)

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:16:53 +0000

I would love to be able to have an event handler on an external list. I have a situation where I need to control which users can actually edit a particular item. The users are authenticated against a custom STS and not AD and will not have access to the back end SQL server. Initially tried to extend a user profile for these user types but the supplemented data is only read only FROM the BCS. Ugh.

By: Paul Hunt

Paul Hunt — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:55:52 +0000

Agreed, one of the things that I wanted to be able to do was have different data connections for my DEV, UAT and Prod environments. At the moment, I’m using the LobSystemInstance property bag to house the connection strings and then selecting the right one using a pre-processor directive depending on which Build I’ve used in VS.

The only downside is we have to do a different build for each environment, where as I’d like to use the same wsp across UAT and Prod to ensure consistency.

But this doesn’t answer the issue of making it more portable, as you point out, access to a context Web would at least give us access to a property bag at the site level. I’ll be watching any developments on this with interest.. Next SUGUK talk maybe if you find a solution!

Paul.

By: Jaap Vossers

Jaap Vossers — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:32:03 +0000

Hi Brian. Don’t get me wrong I do love the new BCS stuff! The point of this post is to point out to people that something important seems to be missing, and it would be really cool if Microsoft would agree and decided to change this before the RTM version is released. Obviously if you don’t plan on developing reusable BCS solutions, you won’t be affected by this limitation, so I do see your point.

By: Brian Bedard

Brian Bedard — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:20:54 +0000

I love the new External List functionality. It takes the Business Data column to its expected evolution. I’m sorry you’re having a hard time porting it and making it reusable. When I start actually developing solutions for the External List I’ll be sure to investigate it and make a blog post. Just remember every new feature with Microsoft takes a little time to gain traction and become “solid”. We should be happy they gave us this functionality — I’ve been waiting for it ever since the BDC was introduced. Maybe because creating an External List is so easy once the External Content Type is created, they want us to use Designer to create them. And because I like to write my own features and site definitions and use CAML and API to provision components, I might be a little irked too.