Question

Please help me with my question.

I want to load external data into Sharepoint through BDC Service and update it sometimes, but I have no experience in Sharepoint so I don’t know how to do that.

In msdn I’ve found that BDC Service is placed on this address http://<\site>/_vti_bin/Bdcadminservice.svc (I can not open link from my client machine).
But there is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee538665.aspx page, which shows that this service is for internal usage.

I can see another way – to use managed client object model, but I’m confused that it uses some libs (Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll .. and any others) that shipped with Sharepoint Server installation. I can’t find any sdk and it is bad.

Are there another ways to perform this task?

Or maybe I’ve understood wrong something from the above.

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you should create BDC Model. In such a case Sharepoint will call your custom methods (which get external data) and you can see it in Sharepoint external list.

You can start here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sp2010devtrainingcourse_businessconectivityserviceslab_topic4.aspx

Also you can watch this video: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff623022.aspx

If it is not enough, just let me know and I’ll try to help you in more details.

UPDATE1: If it is a mandatory case that all this software should work on the client side. I can see two ways (in both you don’t need to use additional SP dll’s on the client side):

1. Use BDC model as I suggested above, but model will be only a proxy to code in client and code from this model will make calls to the client side (using WebServices for example). In such a case when user needs new data (by clicking on external list for example) SP makes call to your code in BDC model, which makes call to the client machine. In other words, initiator of getting data is SP and sequence looks like: User -> SP -> BDC model -> Client Data.
2. You can create custom WebService in SP to update its lists when your client needs it. In such a case, your client received new data and it get to know it must update it in SP. After this it makes call through your custom WebService on SP side, which adds new data to SP using SP object model. In other words initiator of update is client side. Sequence looks lile: Client data -> custom SP WebService, which updates this data on SP side.

In the first case you can organize caching on SP side (for example, make calls to client not often than once a day).

But you have to notice that when you have a lot of data, replicating it in the SP (using the second way) usually is not a good idea and it can take additional efforts to manage it (when to update, what data is already updated, what if part of data is updated and other isn’t in time when user gets it he will get inconsistent data and so on).