Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed

Writing to External Content Types

In SharePoint 2007’s Business Data Catalog, interaction with external data was read-only. There were no means by which authorized users could write back to the external data source. The other major change with BCS in SharePoint 2010 is that external content types can be defined with full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) capabilities.

For many scenarios, writing to an external content type is going to be beyond the scope of what you can do within the confines of SharePoint Designer. It’s likely that the database to which you are connecting will have columns with more sophisticated data requirements. For example, many database tables will have some internal fields whose values are generated by the code in ...