BCS

Today I installed a BCS solution to a SharePoint 2010 farm. I wanted to take the list offline. So I clicked on the SPW button in the ribbon.

As expected, SharePoint Workspace popped open, and tried to get the list. But all I got was an message, that there was an error installing the list.

The eventlog, of the client I was working on, revealed that there was an error installing the solution (And we need the solution, to get the data on our clients. BCS uses solution which are deployed to clients as click-once applications to sync data.). The error details showed something like “Solution Install Stage:PendingDownload Solution Install Error”,the EventId was 2012 and the Datasource “Business Connectivity Services”. Not really a helpful message.

The BCS Team (Business Connectivity Services) wrote an blog post about using complex formatting and custom field types within your BCS model. Obviously this post was the source for the SDK article.

The example shows that you can use a custom field type to render data from external data sources this way:

<TypeDescriptor TypeName="Customer.Address" Name="CustomerAddress" DefaultDisplayName="Customer Address"> 
   <Properties> 
       <Property Name="SPCustomFieldType" Type="Customer.Address">Customer Address</Property> 
   </Properties> 
</TypeDescriptor>

Well, to help you map this example to your data, I’ll write some more about the SPCustomFieldType property of the BCS model.

SharePoint Workspace cannot take a BCS list offline

Using a custom field type in a BCS model