Back from TechEd Developer in Barcelona and with emails and todo tasks finally caught up with we've released a new version of BDC Meta Man, 2.0.0.7.
Some of you will ask what happened between 2.0.0.4 and 2.0.0.7 -> Well these were quiet releases that fixed particular bugs brought to our attention.
New Functionality : Tables Without Primary Keys
Previously it was a requirement for a table or view to have a primary key for it to be dragged and dropped onto the BDC Meta Man design surface. This was because we automatically generated the Finder and Specific Finder methods for you and to do that we needed to make sure the table had an identifier. Now things are different though....
1, If you drag a table or view onto the design surface that doesn't have a primary key you get asked are you sure you want to add it:
2, Clicking yes, you are asked if you would like to specify which columns uniquely identify each row of data ie what are the primary key columns. If you choose no for this step then your entity will get generated with just a Finder method. This means you won't get a profile page or be able to search your entity:
3, By clicking yes you are taking to a form where you can pick which columns to use as identifiers:
Clicking OK will now generate our entity for us with a Finder and Specific Finder method. Because we have declared the identifiers we can also go into our entity admin screen and add an IdEnumerator method so our entity can be searchable by MOSS 2007.
You can download the latest version of BDC Meta Man from here:
http://www.bdcmetaman.com/pages/download.aspx
Look forward to your feedback and ideas for future development and features!