SharePoint 2013 BCS Administration & Capabilities

The BDC Service Application is one of the shared service applications that you can find in central administration and it contains inside of it the database that holds on to all of the different external content types that you create those external content types can be managed together as models.

BDC Services Application

The BDC Service Application is one of the shared service applications that you can find in central administration and it contains inside of it the database that holds on to all of the different external content types that you create those external content types can be managed together as models. So using the shared Service Application we can import and Export Models. We can created them in the SharePoint Designer, but once they’re created in the SharePoint Designer we can find the BDC Service Application, export those files, move into another environment, and import them.

So, using simple import and export techniques, we can move from development to production environments. We can also manage the external content types and make some changes to the way that they’re set up. Most notably we might want to change connection information, we can also manage actions. Actions are additional URLs that you can associate with an external content type that will show up on the dropdown menu associated with items in external list and finally we can manage Profile Pages.

Profile Pages are dedicated pages that provide detailed information about items in external list.

DEMO:

Go to "SharePoint Central Administration" and under "Application Management," click "Manage Service Applications"



On the "Manage Service Applications" finds "Business Data Connectivity Service"



We click on "Business Data Connectivity Service" and we can see the different options, in our case we will click on "Administrators"



Here you can specify which accounts administrators have permissions on the BDC



After to determine who will be the administrators can continue to BDC Administration page, by default the view you get in the beginning showing all the different "external content types" that you have.



BDC Permissions

Another key thing that we do inside of the BDC Service Applications is Manage the permissions for the users. It’s very important to understand that just making an external content type and even setting up credential mapping and secure store is not enough for an end user to actually see data.

You have to give them specific permission to use the model that you create, and so Business Data Catalog provides us with four different permissions that we can use:

Permissions:

BDC Service Application
• Administrators
Metadata Catalog
• Edit
• Execute
• Selectable in Clients
• Set Permissions

More Information:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262207(v=office.12).aspx

Demo:

Inside the admin panel of the BDC, we may give permission to each "External Content Type" one by one u / all at the same time. If you click on "Set Metadata Store Permissions" screen will show us where we can apply different permissions.



Screen to add users and grant permission




Throttling Limits

Throttling limits are in place to prevent issues with bringing large amounts of data back into Business Connectivity Services.

In most cases you will receive the above errors because the Business Data Catalog throttling Configuration is set to a lower value than the number of records the ECT is calling from the Data Source, which in my case was coming from an external database.

Error while executing web part:

Microsoft.BusinessData.Runtime.ExceededLimitException: Database Connector has throttled the response. The response from database contains more than 500 rows. The maximum number of rows that can be read through Database Connector is ’5000′. The limit can be changed via the ‘Set-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig’ cmdlet.

Modifying http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607630.aspx:

Go to PowerShell and execute this script

$MyBdc = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy |
Where {$_ -match "Business Data Connectivity"}
$Mythrot = Get-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig -ThrottleType Items -Scope Database -ServiceApplicationProxy $MyBdc
Set-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig -Maximum 10000 -Default 5000 -Identity $Mythrot
#Disable Throttling
$MyBdc = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy |
Where {$_ -match "Business Data Connectivity"}
$Mythrot = Get-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig -ThrottleType Connections -Scope Global -ServiceApplicationProxy $MyBdc
Set-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig -Enforced $false -Identity $Mythrot

More Information:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607630.aspx