SPSProfessional present the BDC Killer WebParts

Data integration from an outside source into SharePoint, was one of the most wished characteristics that the SharePoint 2003 users were waiting for.

When Microsoft announced the Business Data Catalog, in Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 we all were expecting the possibility of modifying our data, but it never happened, and by the moment the BDC remains as read-only.

On the other hand, the complexity of defining the BDC interface has always been an important barrier, so that a certain number of applications have arose to help us to define these interfaces.

• BDC Metaman from Lightning Tools Ltd
  
• MOSS BDC Design Studio from Simego
  
• and finally Microsoft published an utility in the SDK of MOSS, namely the BDC editor

SPSProfessional it’s working on a set of WebParts  with which we can edit data bases ( for the present only SQL 2005) in just a few minutes. Furthermore these WebParts are working in both MOSS 2007 and WSS3. They are namely ActionDataBase WebParts …

Let us take a quick view

Trough a little win form application ActionDataBase Generator, and introducing a simple Select query of SQL the necessary XML to configurate the ActionDataBaseGrid is generated to recover data from SQL Server and show them into SharePoint.

We can define a simple data view as it in less than one minute.

Using the same utility we can get further, there where BDC is not able to arrive. So simple as indicating a table and the ActionDataBase Generator will generate XML to form another of its powerful WebParts, the ActionDataBaseEditor. A fully CRUD WebPart for our table.

Through it we could edit online our database.

Don´t frighten, it takes just a couple of minutes.

And the ActionDataBase WebParts has other greats features as:

• Fully customizable Tool Bar
  
• Lookup fields
  
• Date and DateTime fields controls
  
• Fields validations (Required, Range, Regular Expression, Comparison)
  
• Rich Text format fields
  
• Filter data

So simple, so marvellous.

You can read more on http://www.spsprofessional.com/