SPS 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) using the Client Object Model

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Article 3 in the small BCS-series:

1. SP 2010: Getting started with the Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
2. SP 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) in SharePoint 2010
3. SP 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) using the Client Object Model

In my previous article in the series, I talked about how easy it is to fetch information using the standard SharePoint server API-approach. In this article I will talk about how you can access data in your BCS data source, by utilizing the Client Object Model.

Client Object Model code to read from the external list

Just like I described in my previous article, you now have the awesome ability to work with data in your External Lists (connected to a data source using BCS) - namely, you can use the standard SharePoint APIs.

Since I've shown you how you can do this using the Server Object Model, I thought I could take another spin at it and show you the code for doing basically the same with the Client Object Model.

The underlying data

As with my previous article, I'm still using the same data source as I set up in my first article - the "ProductList" table in my SQL Server database called "Zimmergren_DB"

As seen in the SQL Server Management Studio:

Let's fetch the data using a Windows Forms application that utilizes the Client Object Model!

I've designed a Windows Forms application to utilize the .NET Client Object model (in contrary to using the Silverlight client object model or JavaScript client object model).

It looks like this:

When you click the fancy button called "Get External Data", it will use the Client Object Model to fetch the records from the external list (from the SQL server) and display them in a DataGridView. Nothing fancy.

The code!

With no further delays or chit-chat, here's the simple code!

    // Define the Client Context (as defined in your textbox)
    SP.ClientContext context = new SP.ClientContext(tbSite.Text);
    SP.Web site = context.Web;

    var ProductList = site.Lists.GetByTitle(tbList.Text);

    SP.CamlQuery camlQueryAwesomeness = new SP.CamlQuery();

    IQueryable<SP.ListItem> productItems =
                                      ProductList.GetItems(camlQueryAwesomeness);

    IEnumerable<SP.ListItem> externalList =
                                      context.LoadQuery(productItems);

    // This is where we actually execute the request against the server!
    context.ExecuteQuery();

    // Retrieve the products from the product list using some fancy LINQ
    var productListData = from product in externalList
      select new
      {
          // We're never pointing to the field at the 0-index
          // because it's used by the BDC Identity itself. Hence our elements start at 1.
          ProductID = product.FieldValues.ElementAt(1).Value.ToString(),
          ProductName = product.FieldValues.ElementAt(2).Value.ToString(),
          ProductDescription = product.FieldValues.ElementAt(3).Value.ToString()
      };

    // Simply clear the rows and columns of the GridView
    gvProducts.Rows.Clear();
    gvProducts.Columns.Clear();

    // Add the columns we need (ProductID, Name, Description)
    gvProducts.Columns.Add("ProductID", "ProductID");
    gvProducts.Columns.Add("Name", "Product Name");
    gvProducts.Columns.Add("Description", "Product Description");
    foreach (var product in productListData)
    {
        // For each product in the list, add a new row to the GridView
        gvProducts.Rows.Add(
                                 product.ProductID,
                                 product.ProductName,
                                 product.ProductDescription
                                 );
    }

References and recommended reading

Summary & Download

At this point, I've showed you three short articles in which I describe how you can set up a Business Connectivity Services data source - then utilize the Server OM or Client OM to fetch information from that external data storage.

Worth to note is that this is still a Beta product, which of course means that it may differ in functionality and performance in comparison with the final (RTM) version of SharePoint 2010.

Download the complete Visual Studio 2010 project here: [ Zimmergren.SP2010.ClientOM.BCS.zip ]

Published: Jan-21-10 | 5 Comments | 0 Links to this post

SPS 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) in SharePoint 2010

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Article 2 in the small BCS-series:

1. SP 2010: Getting started with the Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
2. SP 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) in SharePoint 2010
3. SP 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) using the Client Object Model

In my previous article I talked about how you can set up a simple BCS configuration to fetch and work with external data in SharePoint 2010. In this article I will talk about how you can utilize the SharePoint 2010 object model to work with that external data, directly from the SharePoint API. It's all really simple!

Working with data in an External List using the SharePoint Object Model

The code in this sample doesn't really differ from the way you fetch information from any other list in SharePoint (2007 or 2010). This - of course - is very welcomed news, as we do not need to learn any new frameworks or tools to work with the data in our external lists. It simply works as any other SPList, basically.

Retrieving external data, made simple:

When fetching items from an external list, you can simply do that by utilizing the good-old SPList object. We do not need to work with any other types of namespaces or frameworks in order to do this.

In my SQL Server I've got a table called "ProductList".
This list is filled with the following data:

Fetching some items from the external list, and displaying them in a console app:

// Product List is my external list, that is working with data in the SQL Server!
SPList list = web.Lists["Product List"];

SPQuery q = new SPQuery();
q.Query =
"<Where><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='ProductID' /></IsNotNull></Where>";
q.RowLimit = 100;

SPListItemCollection col = list.GetItems(q);

foreach (SPListItem item in col)
Console.WriteLine(item["Name"].ToString());

This will render the following result (fetched from the database):

The things you see in the console windows is fetched straight from the SQL Server (using a BCS connection through the External List).

Writing data to the External List (hence, writing to the SQL Server)

Seriously, this is way too easy as well...

// Get the external list
SPList list = web.Lists["Product List"];

// Use the traditional approach to create SPListItems and hook it up with the list
SPListItem item = list.Items.Add();
item["Name"] = "Sample Product Wohoo";
item["Description"] = "Sample Description Wohoo";
item.Update();

Upon running this code in your SharePoint application, it will create the SPListItem object and add a Name and Description. When you hit .Update() it will push this data through the data source connection, to your SQL server.

Here's what the updated data looks like:

We're running a Beta-product!

As you can imagine, there's a ton of new cool things to work with in SharePoint 2010 - where the BCS is one. This article discuss the very basics of how you can retrieve information from these lists using the normal API-approach.

At the time of this writing (during Public Beta) there isn't any measures on performance and what impact it has on the server in comparison to alternative ways to fetch and work with the data.

As time goes on, there will be probably be some new information on this - I'll keep you posted when I know more.

Summary

As you can see, working with external data from the SharePoint API isn't very hard to do. What you need to make sure is to have an external list set up somewhere (see this article for how you can do that) and then you can simply use the normal SPList object from the SharePoint object model to work with the external list and it's external data from the SQL server (in my case).

So if you haven't already: Get on the SharePoint 2010 wagon and enjoy the ride!

Published: Jan-19-10 | 6 Comments | 0 Links to this post

SPS 2010: Getting started with Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Article 1 in the small BCS-series:

1. SP 2010: Getting started with the Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
2. SP 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) in SharePoint 2010
3. SP 2010: Programmatically work with External Lists (BCS) using the Client Object Model

BCS in SharePoint 2010 is an awesome refinement of the Business Data Catalog from MOSS 2007. With BCS - or Business Connectivity Services - you get the possibility to connect external data and work with it from SharePoint.

In this article I will not cover the basics of what BCS is all about (MSDN/TechNet does this very well) - I will rather give you a walkthrough of how you can setup a BCS connection to an external database, and then work with this information directly from a SharePoint list - without the user actually knowing anything about the connection to the database.

BCS Poster: Business Connectivity Services Poster
BCS Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bcs/

A sample SQL database

I'll just show you how my sample database is set up - simply create a new database in your SQL Server and have it filled with some example data. In my case, this is the data in my SQL database, called Zimmergren_DB:

In this sample database, I've added a table called ProductList which in theory will represent some products in this database, like this:

I'm filling the database with some sample data, so we will be familiar with this data when we later watch this information from SharePoint:

Alright - we have some sample data in our SQL Server. Nothing fancy, just some very simple data. Great, let's get going with the fun stuff!

Creating an external content type

The most effective and easy way to set up a simple BCS connection, is to use SharePoint Designer 2010. You heard me, we can now get up and running with BCS by using SPD instead of modeling complex ADF files and things like that.

In order to do this, we need to create a new External Content Type!

Here's how do create our External Content Type and hook it up with our database, step by step:

Open the site you want to work with using SharePoint Designer 2010
Select "External Content Types" in the left hand navigation:

Loading this page might take some time, be patient!
Click to create a new External Content Type like this:
Click the link that reads: "Click here to discover external data sources and define operations":
Click "Add Connection"
Select "SQL Server" as your Data Source Type:
Enter the details about your connection to your SQL Server:
When the connection is made, your Data Source Explorer will be filled with the database you have specified. Now choose the table you want to work with, and right-click and select "Create All Operations":

You'll be presented with a wizard-like dialog where you can specify the operations, elements and other properties for your BCS connection.
Click "Next" to get to the Parameters page
Select the field that you want to act as an Identifier. In my case I've selected my ProductID just to get on with it:
Click "Finish"
You'll be presented with a list of operations that your External Content Type can do, like this:

That's it. A few points, a few clicks - and you're done. Let's create an external list (using the Browser to show how simple it is..) and hook up our external content type with it!

Creating an external list

There's a few ways to create an external list in SharePoint 2010. We will create it using the Browser UI to show you how simple it can be.

Open your site and choose Site Actions - More Options…
Select the External List template, and click Create
Enter a name for your list, e.g. Product List
You'll see a field in this list called External Content Type, click the browse-button beside it:

What is really awesome here, is that you're now presented with a dialog where you simply can choose the data source for this list. That means, you'll select the data source you've created (mine is called Zimmergren_DB). Then your list will automatically work against the SQL database, but still have the look and feel of a SharePoint 2010 list.
Select your data source and click OK:
Now simply click the button called Create:

Would you look at that! You're now working with external data, from your (what looks to be) normal SharePoint list! This is brilliant!

You now have the ability to create new items, update existing items, delete items and do all your normal CRUD-operations (CRUD = Create, Read, Update, Delete) straight from the SharePoint 2010 list.

Proof of concept - Adding a new product

Let's just for the fun of it add a new product called "Awesome Product 1.0" like the following screenshot:

Now go to your SQL Server and see the changes take effect immediately. The data is NOT stored in SharePoint, it's stored in your SQL Database.

This is what my table now looks like in the SQL Server, after adding a new item in the SharePoint list:

Summary

With a few points, followed by a few clicks - you've set up your external data connection. Basically it's that simple.

Of course there's a lot of things to consider when doing these configurations - and you might not want to auto-generate the CRUD-operations, but rather create them one by one and specify more fine-grained permissions etc.

This is merely a sample to show you how easy it is to actually get up and running with the SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and work with external data!

Enjoy

Published: Jan-18-10 | 11 Comments | 0 Links to this post