SharePoint 2007: BDC - The Business Data Catalog

This post is in continuation to a series of blogposts I put up on BDC - the Business Data Catalog.

Table of Contents:

You can use LOB data in a custom list using the following steps:

• Assuming that you have a BDC application running as described in this post, go to your sharepoint site, and add a custom list. Call it MyFunkyList.
• Go to the list, and click on "Settings" -> "List Settings"
• Under Columns for the list, choose "Create Column"
• Type in "Northwind Customer Name" as the name of the column, and choose it's data type to be "Business Data"
• Customize the Additional column settings as shown below:
  
• Click "OK". Your list is now ready to use.

To use the LOB data in the list,

• Add a new item in MyFunkyList
• You will see the MOSS provides you with an IDE to choose the appropriate Northwind Customer Name. Go ahead and browse for the appropriate customer, and hit "OK".
• Thats it. You will now see a sharepoint list, with information pulled from a LOB data application. This is shown as below -
  

A few important points of mention:

• The data you see is a "copy". You can easily refresh the latest copy of data from the underlying LOB by hitting the green Refresh icon on the column.
• You also see various actions next to the business data. You can add custom actions to your BDC application definition, and use them in the list as well.
• Do you see only CustomerIDs in filter? Yeah I know that's icky. You can customize that easily by adding more identifiers to the application definition.
• Sometimes, you don't want the user to have to specify BDC information. You could use a List Event receiver, and use the common BDC runtime object model to populate BDC data in a column as well.