Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

10.3. Summary

As demonstrated throughout this chapter, the Business Data Catalog is a metadata mapping shared service, enabling line-of-business applications to make data available as Office SharePoint Server 2007 properties and is an effective tool for Enterprise Application Integration strategies. You began your journey with an introduction to Business Data Catalog, starting with an architectural overview. Next, you explored the Metadata object model, which is crucial to manipulating and navigating BDC applications programmatically. After that grounding, you then learned about the XML Application Definition file and dove deeply into it, both from the database and web service type. The applications within the Business Data Catalog expose their data (types and properties), making it available to all SharePoint Server functionality, as metadata for other applications and services, Web Parts, and business data lists. The majority of the time was spent on the web service application definition because it is less straightforward than the database type.You then finished the chapter with a walk through the runtime API, examining several examples to see how to effectively use it.

Figure 10.8. Figure 10-8