Editor’s Note: In partnership with Microsoft Press, MVPs have been contributing to an ongoing guest series on their official team blog. Today’s article is from Microsoft Integration MVP Chris Givens which is the 29th in the series.
So what have I been working on for the past two weeks? Well, other than consulting clients, books and working on my garden, I have also been involved with the Microsoft Learning SharePoint 2013 Advanced Development Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) course 20489 that will be available later in the year (sorry no link just yet but it will be here when it is released). I was able to finish up two chapters on Search quickly as that is one of my main fortes, but then decided to take what I though was the middle of two Business Connectivity Services (BCS) chapters. For those of you not familiar with BCS, you can find a great overview here. It turns out, the module was the hardest one! Why? Because it covers things that no one has ever done before (outside of the product team that is).
So what is the big deal about what I worked on? You are probably saying to yourself...BCS has been around for a while right? Well, yes this is very true, and there are several great posts about how to expose external data using SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio using the various BDC model types (Database, WCF, .NET Connectivity and Custom). You can also find how to implement stereotyped methods that support CRUD methods and search indexing (link here). Given all that content, there were a game changing set of features that were added to BCS in SharePoint 2013 that add a whole new level of complexity. These features include:
- A new OData model type
- A new subscriber model (which in turn now provides support for alerts and event receivers in external lists)
There are plenty of posts on OData in general (this one from MSDN is pretty awesome if you are just getting started) and a few posts on how to setup a BDC OData model. And although my fellow SharePoint MVP Scot Hillier did a presentation on the subscriber model at the last SharePoint Conference it was only in context of a database model. When it comes to integrating the two features (OData and the subscriber methods) together, that is where a massive black hole exists and is the focus of this blog post.
Read full article here.
About the author
Chris Givens, SharePoint MVP, MCT, CISSP, CCNP is a SharePoint architect, trainer and consultant. He is the CEO of Architecting Connected Systems a top Microsoft courseware provider with several popular courseware titles in SharePoint with customers in over 40 countries around the world. His blog is at http://blogs.architectingconnectedsystems.com and is co-author of the MSPress title Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Inside Out due out in November 2013. Follow him on Twitter.
About MVP Monday
The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager, formerly known as MVP Lead, for Messaging and Collaboration (Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and SharePoint) and Microsoft Dynamics in the US. She began her career at Microsoft as an Exchange Support Engineer and has been working with the technical community in some capacity for almost a decade. In her spare time she enjoys going to the gym, shopping for handbags, watching period and fantasy dramas, and spending time with her children and miniature Dachshund. Melissa lives in North Carolina and works out of the Microsoft Charlotte office.