Online Resources

Manning’s Author Online forum provides a location where questions related to this book or the Business Data Catalog can be posted for the authors: http://www.manning.com/SharePoint2007DevelopersGuidetoBusinessDataCatalog

BDC Meta Man, which has been referenced in this book as a useful tool to create your application definition file, can be downloaded from http://www.light-ningtools.com.

The SharePoint Server 2007 Software Development Kit, which contains some code samples used within this book along with a tool to help create your application definition file, can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en.

The Northwind database was used as a sample database in SQL 2005 for this book. Northwind can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/Down-loads/details.aspx?FamilyID=06616212-0356-46a0-8da2-eebc53a68034&display-lang=en.

Episode 12 of the SharePoint Pod Show is a podcast recording of Brett Lons-dale, Nick Swan, and Rob Foster introducing the Business Data Catalog, and is a useful accompaniment to this book. You can download episode 12 from http://www.sharepointpodshow.com.

The author’s personal blog sites are http://www.brettlonsdale.com and http://www.sharepointnick.com.

About the Cover Illustration

Chapter 1. Introducing the Business Data Catalog

1.1. Life before the Business Data Catalog

1.2. What’s the Business Data Catalog?

1.3. BDC architecture

1.4. Data sources and how we connect to them

1.5. Summary

Chapter 2. Understanding the application definition file

2.1. Introducing the application definition file

2.2. Creating an application definition file

2.3. Summary

Chapter 3. Security

3.1. Authentication

3.2. Permissions

3.3. Exercise: employing RevertToSelf authentication

3.4. Summary

Chapter 4. Out-of-the-box BDC Web Parts

4.1. The purpose of the out-of-the-box web parts

4.2. Using SharePoint Designer with the Business Data List Web Part

4.3. Sorting, grouping, and filtering

4.4. Exercise: joining two web parts

4.5. Summary

Chapter 5. Using the Business Data field type in lists and libraries

5.1. The Business Data field type

5.2. Customizing the Document Information panel with InfoPath 2007

5.3. Creating a SharePoint custom field type

5.4. Summary

Chapter 6. Configuring BDC search

6.1. Configuring the ADF to allow searching

6.2. Setting up crawling

6.3. Building a custom Search Results page

6.4. Exploring the search web parts

6.5. Modifying the core Search Results page

6.6. The Search API