Jun26

SharePoint User Group Mug!

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A friend from the user group Andrew Florendine is lucky enough to be jetting off to work in Australia in a SharePoint role that he actually managed to find through the jobs forum area over on SUGUK.

As a way of saying thank you he organized this fantastic mug to be delivered to me! Very nice to receive something from someone with a thank you message even though all you've done is provide a platform for these kinds of things to happen.

I thought other members of the user group might be interested in getting a mug as well. If you are, add your name in a comment over on the suguk post:

http://suguk.org/blogs/sharepoint_blog_1/archive/2007/06/26/3873.aspx

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Jun24

Business of Software Conference

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These cool things never get held in the UK, and when they do I usually find out about them 2 months after they've occurred. Anyway check out the Business of Software conference being held in the US in October. I'm considering funding my own way to this as it does look really good!

http://www.businessofsoftware.org/

If anybody hasn't read the Business of Software by Eric Sink you can also download a copy of the eBook for free from the site at the link above. It's a great read.

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Jun19

MOSS BDC – search across your business data

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So you know I definitely was busy this weekend! This is our third screencast that shows you how to enable MOSS 2007 Search to crawl and index you line of business data that you've made accessible though the BDC.

http://www.bdcmetaman.com/Knowledge%20Base/Business%20Data%20Search.aspx

In 13 minutes you could have your organization searching your CRM or products database with BDC Meta Man and MOSS BDC!

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Jun19

MOSS BDC – Stored Procedures

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We've recorded our second screencast. This one walks you through how to use BDC Meta Man to generate an application definition file from your MS SQL Server Stored Procedures.

http://www.bdcmetaman.com/Knowledge%20Base/MOSS%20BDC%20-%20using%20Stored%20Procedures%20with%20MS%20SQL%20Server.aspx

We've got plenty of other MOSS BDC and BDC Meta Man screencasts in the pipeline so stay tuned. If there's a specific topic you want to see covered please let me know.

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Jun19

BDC Meta Man new version - Stored Procedures Supported

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We were working like crazy this weekend to get our new version of BDC Meta Man out to people. Quite a lot of customers have been asking to get the tool working for stored procedures. These have been companies who are very sensitive about their data and generally employee full time DBAs to look after who is accessing their data, what queries are being executed, and how efficient they are. Getting the BDC to do a SELECT query against a table would be a big no-no for them.

So now with a little bit of hard work we've got BDC Meta Man able to generate application definition files for Stored Procedure calls to get your data. Now with Stored Procedures you will have to probably create a stored procedure to return the data you want for the specific BDC method types. For example:

Finder – used by BDC data list web part. Example query : Select * From Product

Specific Finder – used by profile page, and search. Should only return a single row of data. Example query : Select * From Product Where ProductID = @ProductID

Finder – used by search. Should only return the id column(s) for rows you want to be indexed. Example query : Select ProductID From Product

Here's a screen shot of a Stored Procedure being added to an entity…

Notice the names of the stored procs. They reflect the types of queries I mentioned earlier that BDC methods will require.

You'll need to download version 1.2.0.11 beta of BDC Meta Man to get the Stored Procedure functionality. BDC Meta Man currently only works for MS SQL Server Stored Procedures. There's also an upcoming screencast about how to make use of them with BDC Meta Man in the next blog post here so stay tuned! Make sure you watch it will explain exactly how to go about making use of Stored Procedures to you. It will be posted up in our BDC Knowledge Base:

http://www.bdcmetaman.com/Knowledge%20Base/Home.aspx

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Jun8

MOSS BDC and BDC Meta Man Knowledge Base

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We think BDC Meta Man is a good tool but then of course we are biased! I've been working with a few customers recently on a consultancy basis, and although we already knew this, they pointed out that the application wasn't particularly well documented.

Well we're putting that to rights now, both in terms of BDC Meta Man and the BDC in general. Here's a link to the new BDC Meta Man Knowledge Base.

We're planning on having a written and screencast version of each knowledge base article. The first one is already up. Here's the text link:

MOSS BDC Getting Started

And here's the screen cast:

http://www.bdcmetaman.com/screencasts/howto1.wmv

Plenty more coming on a day by day basis. What areas of BDC Meta Man and the BDC in general would you like to see documented next?

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Jun5

BDC Meta Man functionality improved for Developer and Professional versions - 1.2.0.10 released

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After the brief release notes last night on the BDC Meta Man blog I thought it would be a good idea to post more details on the functionality we've released for version 1.2.0.10 of BDC Meta Man. As well as fixing a few bugs we've also added some new functionality and unlocked some features for the developer version. The first part we'll go though is the developer version:

1, Add two entities to a design surface

With the previous version of BDC Meta Man if you were using the free Developer version you could only drag and drop one SQL Server table onto the design surface to create an entity. This meant it was not possible to create associations because to do that you would need two entities to create an association between J. Now with BDC Meta Man version 1.2.0.10 you can add up to two entities to a design surface. This not only allows you to create more complex and larger application definition files but also means you can create associations between the two entities to make use of the Business Data List and Business Data Related List web parts.

For a complete walk through of how to add multiple entities, create an association, and start using the Business Data Web Parts check our knowledge base article here:

Link coming later today!

2 a, The new functionality that I'm going to cover now in part two is all about being able to add filters to entities. Before I can cover that though I wanted to explain a change we have made in how the application definition files are generated.

MethodInstance tags for MOSS BDC application definition files are great as they allow methods to be used for multiple uses. The example I can give you for this of previous versions of BDC Meta Man were methods we automatically generated were being used as Finder and SpecificFinder methods. This was all very good until it came to editing your application definition file or adding filters as we wanted to do. It was possible but having both method types in one method made it a lot more difficult to understand, and the UI for adding Filters many times more complicated. We therefore decided it would be best to no longer generate a single method that behaves as both a Finder and a SpecificFinder method. From BDC Meta Man version 1.2.0.10 the entity methods that are generated for entire tables will contain separate Finder and SpecificFinder methods

2 b, Now that we have the point above sorted we can mention the new functionality we have added! You can now easily add Filters to your method calls with BDC Meta Man. With the simple click of a button and selecting a few values you'll be able to filter the data being bought back and shown in MOSS 2007. Although you can add Filters to any methods, we think it will only be the Finder methods that people will want to be doing this for. We haven't restricted adding filters to any other type of method yet but if for example you do add a filter to a SpecificFinder method it may start to not work correctly. Here's a quick guide how to add a filter to an entity.

We've dragged and dropped the Products table from AdventureWorks2000 onto our design surface

Right click on the entity and chose 'Edit Entity' from the context menu

Click on the 'Methods' tab to display our methods. For previous users of BDC Meta Man you'll notice the second half of this form has been dramatically simplified and improved.

Select a method from the Methods list box

Click the 'New Filter' button and a new form will pop up. This is where you configure the your filter.

Give your filter a nice name, this is the value that will show in the Business Data List drop down as the field you can filter on.

Click Save to create the Filter, then save the entity. Generate your application definition file. Once you have imported it and added the web part you'll now be able to filter the products being returned by the product name!

Again this functionality is available in the free Developer version for the two entities that you can add to the design surface. To download the latest version of BDC Meta Man please visit the following link:

http://www.bdcmetaman.com/pages/download.aspx

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