Chapter 11. Writing back to the line-of-business system
This chapter covers
You may be a little confused at the title of this chapter, or possibly think that we’re off our rockers, because Microsoft markets the Business Data Catalog in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Enterprise as “read only” and this chapter is all about writing back to the LOB system. The Business Data Catalog does support read/write, both in the object model and in the application definition file. It’s the web parts that don’t support write back or updates. There are mixed reviews about writing back to the LOB system, which may be why Microsoft didn’t allow the out-of-the-box web parts to read and write. In the back-end databases, you’ll find validation, and referential integrity, which won’t be present in the web parts. Therefore, when you write custom code that does write back, you’ll need to make sure that all of the validation rules are met! Most business applications implement lots of validation on the data prior to submitting it to the back-end database. Some validation is carried out at database level, and some is done at presentation level. Take Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for example: in the UI, there are checks for valid phone numbers and ZIP codes before a round trip is made to the database.