SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services

This article explores another feature of SharePoint 2010 - Business Connectivity Services. This service allows data reading and writing from external data sources.

Using BCS we can access and modify data from:

• WCF Service
• Database
• Business Applications
• .Net Assembly connecting to Business Data
• Custom Connectors

BCS Architecture

The BDC Runtime is responsible for connecting to the external data sources. External data sources connections are stored in BCS Metadata inside SharePoint. The BCS Metadata allows connecting to the data sources in offline mode too. SharePoint acts as a Presentation layer in this scenario.



Note

The previous version of BCS was BDC (Business Data Catalog).

The following are the components of BCS.

BDC Metadata Store

This component provides storage for metadata consisting of external data sources and content types and it will be part of the BCS layer.

BDC Server Runtime

This runtime component is responsible for connecting to the BDC Metadata Store and processing the requests.

BDC Client Runtime

Client runtime provides offline storage, synchronizing data back to the server etc.

SharePoint Designer

We can use SharePoint Designer provided tools for creating BCS Solutions.

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee819133.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ee557898.aspx

Summary

In this article we have explored the BCS feature of SharePoint 2010. In the next article we can experiment with creating a BCS external content type inside SharePoint.