Access denied by Business Data Connectivity - Solution

by Tobias Zimmergren

Lately I’ve been rolling around parts of Sweden and doing training, seminars and workshops on SharePoint 2010 with a bunch of companies and people.

One thing that I’ve been showing off, which I’m totally in love with by the way, is the BCS (Business Connectivity Services) functionality.

I’ve been getting a few questions from people who have been trying this out, but stumbled onto some problems with it in terms of permissions when they tried it out themselves.

Problem – Access Denied by Business Data Connectivity

When you’ve created your external list and try to access it (even as the same user, Administrator, that created it) you might get the following error:


Access denied by Business Data Connectivity

If you bump into this, please don’t freak out – just keep reading..

Solution – Permissions on the BCS Entity

To resolve this so called problem, follow along here:

Go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications -> Business Data Connectivity Service* -> [Your Entity] -> Set Permissions

(* or whatever name you’ve chosen for your BCS Service application)

SharePoint BCS Service application permission configuration.

Configure the actual permissions

In my case below, I’ve just told SharePoint that my Farm Administrator should be able to do all actions (Edit, Execute, Selectable in Clients and Set Permissions)

Grant the proper permissions for BCS in SharePoint.

Please note: You might want to use different permissions in your environments – the permissions set in this blog post is just to demonstrate how you effectively change/add permissions for your BCS Entities to get up and running.

You will most likely be required to performa an IISRESET at this point to force SharePoint to understand what just happened :-)

Check your external list

You should now be able to access the external list and see the desired result.

Edit: As mentioned in the comments by David Parra, you can in some cases set “Metada “Metadata Store Permissions” if the other attempts fail. Just remember to always do an IISRESET after you’ve set the permissions.

Keep rocking folks!

Cheers