Getting started with BDC Web Man and Oracle

If you are using the Business Data Catalog and Oracle and want to make your Oracle data available to SharePoint through a Service Orientated Architecture then this article is for you. BDC Web Man is a tool that will generate all of the WCF services you need to be able to accomplish your goal.

Ideally you want your web service methods to mimic BDC methods - so for each BDC entity you'll have a Finder, SpecificFinder and IdEnumerator web method. BDC Web Man generates all these web methods for you saving you hours of tedious coding.

BDC Web Man actually generates WCF Services that use the BasicHttp binding. This is the only type of WCF binding that works with the BDC with MOSS 2007.

We'll keep refering to these WCF Services as Web Services throughout this article.

For this walkthrough we are going to use HR application and database that ships as part of the Oracle Express Download

Create Web Application

First thing we want to do it create a web application to host the web services we generate.

1, Create a folder where the C# and necessary web service physical files can be located. I have created a folder at c:\employees

2, Open Internet Information Services (IIS) and expand the Sites node

3, Right Click on the Sites node and choose Add Web Site

4, Set the site name to employees, the physical directory to the folder you created in step 1, and the host name to employees. If you are using DNS you may want to use a different host name.

(click to view larger image)

5, Optional step - if you do not have DNS setup you will want to create a entry in your hosts file. Open the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add in an entry for : 127.0.0.1 employees

These are all the steps we need to create our web application and setup so we can browse to our service when it is created.

Generating the BDC web services for Oracle

6, Open up BDC Web Man, click on the Connect to data source drop down and choose Oracle

7, Enter the Oracle instance you want to connect to and also your oracle account details

8, You will see your Oracle database instance displayed in the top right of the screen, expand the node and you'll see the Oracle tables available to you. If you drag and drop one of these tables onto the design surface BDC Web Man will automatically generate the Finder, SpecificFinder and IdEnumerator web methods for you.

9, We want to create Department and Employee entities within the Business Data Catalog, so drag onto the design surface the Department and Employee tables.

10, On our Dashboard we want to make use of the BDC Data List Web Part to show our Departments, and link this to the BDC Related List Web Part so that when they click on the Department it shows the filtered employees. To do this we need to create an BDC association method between the entities, and to be able to do this when using web services we need to create a Web Method that models this BDC association method. The Web Method should accept a departmentId as a parameter and return a list of filtered employees.

Thankfully BDC Web Man can generate this Web Method for us also. All you have to do is drag between the primary key of your parent object and drop it on the foreign key of your child object

11, Now we just need to tell BDC Web Man where to generate our web service files to. From the main menu choose Configuration -> Settings

12, In the settings box we need to set the DNS value for our web service, for us this will be just employees. Also we need to select the folder where to generate our web service files - for us this will be c:\employees. Once these values are set click Save.

13, All that is left for us to do is click the play button towards the top left corner of the application or choose Build -> Generate web services from the main menu. Once you're files have been generated you are asked if you want to view the folder where the files now are, clicking yes will open windows explorer

It doesn't look like much to start with but if you open the app_code folder you'll see all the c# code BDC Web Man generates for you.

14, Finally if we browse to our web service url we will see the discovery page of our HttpBasic WCF web service

The next thing to do is to use BDC Meta Man to generate the XML application definition file to describe these web services to SharePoint and the BDC. You can see how to do that here:

BDC application definition files for Web Services.