Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Chapter 10. Using the Business Data Catalog

By John Alexander

Up until now the options have been limited for effectively searching line-of-business data. Enter the Business Data Catalog (BDC), a shared service that exposes data from enterprise line-of-business applications to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Business Data Catalog is a metadata mapping shared service, enabling line-of-business applications to make data available as Office SharePoint Server 2007 properties.

When you add an application into the BDC, all the exposed application data (types and properties) is made available to all SharePoint Server functionality, either as metadata for other applications and services, Web Parts, or business data lists. This powerful new shared service exposed by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server will be a major element in any integration strategy, as you will see throughout the chapter.

Note that this chapter focuses on creating applications in the BDC as opposed to consuming them. For a broader discussion of consuming Business Data Catalog applications, please refer to Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 by Amanda Murphy and Shane Perran, published by Wrox Press.

In this chapter, you will:

• Explore the architecture of the Business Data Catalog

• Learn how to plan best practices for the Business Data Catalog

• Add an application to the Business Data Catalog

• Configure an application and expose properties and types ...