Introducing the Business Data Catalog

The Business Data List Web Part lets you choose an entity from the catalog and display all instances of that entity in the back-end data source. It lets you filter the query on the backend data based on the FilterDescriptors that are in the ADF file. You can also control the output by using a custom Extensible Style Language (XSL) style sheet. In our example, the Web Part displays the data in the section at the bottom left of Figure 3. I configured the Web Part to return every Actor entity rather than perform any filtering.

I can now use the Business Data Related Links Web Part to exploit the relationship I set up between the Actors and Movies databases in the ADF. When you configure the Related Links Web Part, you'll be able to see all the relationships that are defined in the BDC. Therefore, by choosing the ActorToMovie relationship, then using Web Part Connections to feed the selected actor into it, the movies will be associated with the selected actor. (After you define an entity in the catalog, it's accessible to many places, including a column in a list. So, when I defined the custom list that you see displayed in Figure 3, I specified the Actor column as being of type Business Data.) Next, you'll see a UI that lets you browse the catalog and select an entity that you want to display in that column. Recall that in the example, the default return value was the ActorName field so this is what's displayed. But you can choose to return whichever properties of an entity that you want. The data that's retrieved through the BDC is read-only, but it will be updated automatically when any of the writeable columns in the item are updated. This functionality lets you group custom data with data that exists elsewhere (and is probably currently only accessible through an LOB application). How powerful is that?

When you combine all the new features that SharePoint Search offers with the BDC, you can get similar results to what Web Figure 2 shows. You can see a separate tabbed search results landing page for actors with a pivot link for movies. When you select that link, you'll see another search results page showing all the movies that actor has appeared in.

Getting Down to Business
Do you have any data locked up in back-end business applications that you'd like to exploit? The BDC might be the answer. The BDC is a fantastic addition to SharePoint technologies, even though it's still immature with few support tools. I recommend you get familiar with the topics in the MOSS SDK. Armed with that information and a detailed knowledge about the back-end data, you'll be ready to fully exploit all your corporate LOB data.

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