Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 10. LightSwitch with SharePoint Data

At this point in your adventure, you have a working application. You can add new users via the admin screens. You can assign profile information to your users, create and edit your help desk queues, and assign and manage tickets against each of those queues. It’s a great start and was written with very little code. In this chapter, you’ll add a SharePoint-based knowledge base where users can search for help directly from the portal. You’ll automatically publish case notes to SharePoint when a ticket closes.

Up to this point in the book, you’ve been able to accomplish everything with just a basic developer workstation and Visual Studio LightSwitch installed. You’ll need a server with at least SharePoint Foundation installed in order to accomplish the tasks in this chapter. If you don’t have a SharePoint environment already, the configuration section of this book (Chapter 30) will walk you through options around creating and building out your own SharePoint farm.

Note

You may be tempted to leverage the free trial of SharePoint Online, but you will discover as we did that LightSwitch is not currently able to connect to SharePoint Online without third-party data source extensions. Future releases of LightSwitch and SharePoint Online plan to address this. Connecting LightSwitch to Office 365 requires Visual Studio Update 2. Previous versions are compatible with only on premise deployments of SharePoint.

Logical SharePoint Architecture

The logical ...