Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

4.3 Business Data Catalog 81

Chapter 4

supported. Once articles have gone through an approval process and pub-

lished, they appear in the drop-down menu on the global horizontal naviga-

tion bar.

Reports

The report center site is used to monitor and report on key activities. It inte-

grates with the business intelligence services delivered by MOSS and has a

report library within it for storing documents and dashboards.

Search

The place where all search results are rendered!

Sites

This contains the site directory, which is essentially a list called Sites that is

populated as sites are created or manually updated with links to already

created sites (either SharePoint or non-SharePoint sites). By carefully con-

trolling the metadata associated with the Site Directory, you can turn it

into a very useful Yellow Pages-type directory so that everyone in your

organization can benefit.

To finish this discussion on the collaboration portal template, we’d like

to touch on managing site content, structure, and navigation. There is an

option that is only available for sites that have the publishing feature enabled

that allows administrators to manage a site collection’s content and structure

from one place, as shown in Figure 4.9. If you are used to managing the hier-

archy of portal areas in SPS2003, then this is the equivalent place in a MOSS

collaboration portal. From this bird’s-eye view of your site, you can easily

move content around and create new content, such as sites, lists, libraries,

and items. You can even perform operations like viewing the recycle bin and

site settings of individual sites and lists from this window.

4.3 Business Data Catalog

The Business Data Catalog Shared Service (BDC) is a metadata-driven con-

nector that allows you to access data held in back-end line-of-business appli-

cations and surface that data in multiple places within your site collections.

This means that back-end data can be used in site columns, look-up lists,

user profiles, and Web Parts. Indeed, the data can even be surfaced through

other shared services, such as search, which can significantly increase the

value and reach of your business data. Although the surfaced data is read-

only in SharePoint you could, for example, surface links to the actual back-

end application and present these to the end users as custom actions. That

82 4.3 Business Data Catalog

way the end user can easily launch the actual back-end application with the

relevant item selected for processing.

You might think that a discussion about accessing data in back-end line-

of-business applications would be a developer-type topic and, to some degree

it is, since an awareness of the objects is certainly required. But the reason we

are covering it in this section of the book is that you do not need to write any

code to exploit the data. The intention here is to give you a high-level over-

view of how it works and to show it in action through some samples so that

you can appreciate its power.

The BDC removes the complexity of accessing back-end data which, to

date, has typically meant writing lots of glue code that cater for security

requirements, open connections, execute queries, filter data, etc. Instead of

expending your efforts writing this code, you now need to think about

describing the objects and access methods to the back-end data in XML, and

the BDC framework takes care of all the rest. The BDC supports two types

of access methods—to practically all popular databases using ADO.NET,

OLEDB, and ODBC drivers, and through application-specific Web services,

assuming it supports a relevant retrieval method. A logical diagram of the

BDC is shown in Figure 4.10.

4.3.1 Application Definition File

An application definition file, is used to define the access methods and

objects in the back-end data source. In essence, it describes the APIs for the

application, what can be done with the API, and the relationships between

the different data entities found in the back-end database or application. The

ADF is an XML file that must be well-formed and adhere to the schema

defined at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Bin\bdcmeta-

data.xsd on a WFE server. The major components of the ADF are as follows:

Figure 4.9

Manage site

content and

structure.