I’ve had a few requests for a basic guide of how to use the BDCGenerator I made available for download a few weeks ago. I must admit I was so keen to get the app available to try out I didn’t think about any instructions and ran out of time before other things needed to be done. So here it is, the beginners guide to BDCGenerator…
1, Download version 1 of BDCGeneratorSimple. As I mentioned before this is a very early release for a beta product, so expect things not to be perfect! :-)
2, Unzip the download and run BDCGeneratorSimple.exe. No flashy installer here yet!
3, Enter the server name you wish to connect to. It’s advised that pass through Windows Authentication is used for the Business Data Catalog so that is all that is implemented for the application for the moment.
4, Using the treeview on the left expand the database you want to import a table for, and then expand the columns if you want to double check it’s the right one. Make sure the name of the table is highlighted, and then click the ‘Add Table’ button. You’ll see the listview box populate with all the tables column names and types.
When you click the ‘Add Table’ button the application creates a number of objects for you:
LobSystem
LobSystemInstance
Entity – and within this entity creates more object as we’ll see in a minute.
5, If you want to see what objects have been created for the entity, and edit any of the entity details, click on the Entity menu, and then Properties
The BDCGenerator is quite nice and generates everything you need for getting data out of your table, creating all the objects for each column, and default methods for extracting data. The UI isn’t too friendly at the moment for editing these objects unless you really know what you are doing (it’s a prototype remember!), but the one thing you may want to do it add an IDEnumerator method. This will allow your BDC data to be crawled by your Shared Service Provider so that records turn up in search results.
Once you’ve added/changed anything of the entity object click update/cancel and you go back to the main screen. To generate your application definition file, click the ‘Generate Xml’ button. This saves a file called test.xml in the same directory where you ran the program from. Again remember this is a prototype! :-) In the next version you’ll be able to name the file yourself!
And that’s it. Not much too it at the moment but just looking for feedback. If you’ve given it a try please let me know what you think. Especially the UI for editing an entity. Is it easier to use this app than write the application defintion xml files by hand!?