Connecting to Business Data Catalog

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The Business Data Catalog (abbreviated as "BDC") is a feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007, that enable you to surface business data from various LOB applications such as SAP, Siebel and databases in Office SharePoint Server 2007. To achieve this goal, Business Data Catalog provides homogeneous access to the underlying data sources with a metadata model that provides a consistent and simplified client object model, which consists of applications and entities.

The BDC connection panel is displayed when you select the Business Data Catalog option from the Data Source Type combo:

The web part will enumerate the available applications in the Application combo. For each application that you choose the web part will enumerate the available entities in the Entity combo.

The Entity property of the Business Data Catalog connection can be specified with expressions too.

The Business Data Catalog is a SharePoint 2007 specific feature, support for which has been dropped by Microsoft in SharePoint 2010. However, for the purpose of opening templates that were generated in SharePoint 2007, this data source connection option is also available in the SharePoint 2010 version of the Nevron WebParts.