BDC Web Man

web services for the Business Data Catalog

BDC Web Man

With business's developing solutions around Service Orientated Architectures they are looking to present their Line of Business data to the Business Data Catalog through web services. The Business Data Catalog however works best when the web service methods match up to the Business Data Catalog method types

eg
BDC Method - Web Service Method

Finder - public List<Customer> GetCustomers()

SpecificFinder - public Customer GetCustomerById(int CustomerId)

IDEnumerator - public List<int> GetCustomerIds()

We've had a number of people work with us through our support channels to get their web services working with the BDC. Through this we have developed a new product to take the pain away from writing all the web service code - BDC Web Man.

Web Services for the BDC Made Easy

The BDC Web Man user interface should be very familiar to users of BDC Meta Man. You create your web service objects similar to how you create entities - by dragging and dropping tables on the design surface. You can also create the association web methods you may want to use. When you are happy with your web services you can click the generate button and all the code that may have taken you hours to hand write is generated for you as a WCF HttpBasic Web Service.

See it in Action

We've split this screen cast into two sections.

1, Creating web services with BDC Web Man
2, Using your generated web services with BDC Meta Man and the Business Data Catalog

Get it Now

Download a beta of BDC Web Man by clicking here.

Upcoming Updates

We've got a number of great features ideas which are already underway such as...
- generate web services for existing BDC applications
- generate Silverlight Web Parts

And we're looking for more. To get involved with the idea cycle please check out http://connect.lightningtools.com