About this Book
This book is designed to provide a detailed developer’s guide to the SharePoint 2007 Business Data Catalog. Its primary focus is to explore all five services that the Business Data Catalog provides out of the box, before taking a leap to the next level, where we’ll begin to develop solutions using the Business Data Catalog and its object model. Having read this book, you’ll be armed with all of the information required to tackle any Business Data Catalog project.
This book has 11 chapters and three appendixes. The first three chapters will get you started with the Business Data Catalog, beginning with a gentle introduction, through to understanding the application definition file in depth. We then take a look at security and how that should be configured for us to connect to our line-of-business data.
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the Business Data Catalog. In this chapter, we discuss the architecture of the Business Data Catalog, and briefly describe the services that are offered by the BDC.
Chapter 2 provides a detailed understanding of the application definition file. We explore the methods, entities, associations, actions, and so on that make up the ADF. We do this keeping in mind that today you wouldn’t write an ADF by hand, but still require an understanding so that you can support it.