Defining the External Content Type

The next set of exercises step through how to create the most basic External Content Type. The example uses the Customers table of the AdventureWorks database.

There are several operations available for an External Content Type; however, two specific ones—Read List and Read Item—are required before it can be consumed by SharePoint.

A Read List operation provides all the rows of the table that meet the criteria defined in the operation. In the Customer example, a Read List operation can enable viewing of all the records from the Customers table in one SharePoint list, with it looking and acting like a SharePoint list. Although the data continues to live in the AdventureWorksLT database on SQL Server, it can be ...

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