In SharePoint 2013, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a set of components that enable you to work with data that resides outside of SharePoint. The BCS enables you to support the full range of create, retrieve, update, delete, and query (CRUDQ) data operations on external data sources from SharePoint and from Office client applications. When you connect to external data sources through the BCS, you can work with the data in a variety of ways. For example:
- ·You can use the built-in Business Data Web Parts to display, query, and interact with the data.
- You can create external lists, which enables you to interact with external data in a similar way to standard SharePoint list data.
- You can use the Search service to index and query the data.
- You can use the data to augment user profiles.
- You can use the data to drive SharePoint workflows.
- You can interact with the data from Office client applications.
- You can create custom-coded SharePoint solutions that use the BCS object model to support more esoteric scenarios.
Business Data Connectivity models
The BCS uses Business Data Connectivity (BDC) models to represent data entities within an external system. The BDC model is a self-contained, XML-based file that provides SharePoint with all the information it needs to connect to and interact with external data. This information includes:
- Details of how to connect to and authenticate to the external system.
- Definitions for each data entity of interest on the external system.
- Definitions for each CRUDQ data access method you want to perform against data entities.
A BDC model is portable. You can export it and import it. You can create BDC models for the following types of data sources:
- SQL Server databases
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services
- Open Data Protocol (OData) web services
- Other types of data source, by using a .NET connectivity assembly.
You can create BDC models interactively in SharePoint Designer for SQL Server databases and WCF web services. For OData web services and other types of data source, you can use Visual Studio templates to create and develop the model. BCS service applications SharePoint includes two service applications that underpin the functionality of BCS:
- The BDC service application. This service application stores and manages BDC models.
- The Secure Store service application. This service application enables you to map SharePoint users to external system credentials. For example, you could map a group of SharePoint users to a set of SQL Server credentials that provide access to a specific database.