SharePoint

BCS Meta Man - Using a Connection String stored in the Secure Store

Lightning Tools — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:32:00 GMT

In this blog post I will show you how you can update your code to use a connection string in the Secure Store rather than having the value hard coded in your BCS Meta Man generated c# file. The reason why you may wish to put the connection details within the Secure Store is that the names of the database and server are likely to be different in my development environment than in my staging and production environments. In order to do this you will need to have the use of the secure store which is only available in SharePoint Server 2010 and not SharePoint Foundations.

To be able to use the details stored within the secure store you will be required to do some manual changes to the code generated by BCS Meta Man.

First of all create a new Secure Store application with the Connection String Field

Central Administration > Service Applications > Secure Store > New

Using the ‘Add Field’ button add a generic field called ‘Connection String’ and remove the other two fields

Click next and then add the Secure Store Administrator on the next screen. Now the Secure Store ID has been created you can click on it and choose to set the credentials, this is where you supply all of the credentials required.

Enter the connection string and the Credential Owner, Click OK

In BCS Meta Man, create a new BCS Meta Man Project and when connecting to your Data Source choose ‘Use Secure Store’ as your Authentication Mode.

You will be prompted for your credentials again, this is to allow BCS Meta Man to connect to the External System. Next create the External Content Type and choose .Net Assembly connector as the Model Type, generate the External Content Type in the usual way.

At this point the Model and assembly will be configured to the use Secure Store credentials for the User Name and Password but not for the Server and Database, Deploy the model to ensure the Secure Store details are correct. If it is working and you can see your External Data then it’s time to configure the code to retrieve the Server and Database, if not then check back to the Secure Store and make sure the credentials you entered have the permissions to the External System you are using.

Locate the BCSMetaMan.cs class and find the following method which retrieves the credentials from the Secure Store

internal Dictionary<string, string> ReadCredentialsFromSecureStore()
{
    // error checking removed for brevity
    string targetId = LobSystemInstance.GetProperties()["SsoApplicationId"] as string;
    ISecureStoreProvider provider = GetSecureStoreProvider();

    var userCredentials = new Dictionary<string, string>(2);

    // get the credentials for the user on whose behalf the code 
    // is executing 
    using (SecureStoreCredentialCollection credentials = provider.GetRestrictedCredentials(targetId))
    {

        // look for username and password in credentials 
        foreach (ISecureStoreCredential credential in credentials)
        {
            switch (credential.CredentialType)
            {
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.UserName:
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.WindowsUserName:
                    userCredentials.Add("UserID", GetStringFromSecureString(credential.Credential));
                    break;
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.Password:
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.WindowsPassword:
                    userCredentials.Add("Password", GetStringFromSecureString(credential.Credential));
                    break;
                default:
                    break;
            }
        }
    }

    return userCredentials;
}

You should be able to see that by default only the Username and Password are retrieved, replace the method with the following to pick up the Generic Field that we are using for the Connection String

internal Dictionary<string, string> ReadCredentialsFromSecureStore()
{
    // error checking removed for brevity
    string targetId = LobSystemInstance.GetProperties()["SsoApplicationId"] as string;
    ISecureStoreProvider provider = GetSecureStoreProvider();

    var userCredentials = new Dictionary<string, string>(2);

    // get the credentials for the user on whose behalf the code 
    // is executing 
    using (SecureStoreCredentialCollection credentials = provider.GetRestrictedCredentials(targetId))
    {

        // look for username and password in credentials 
        foreach (ISecureStoreCredential credential in credentials)
        {
            switch (credential.CredentialType)
            {
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.UserName:
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.WindowsUserName:
                    userCredentials.Add("UserID", GetStringFromSecureString(credential.Credential));
                    break;
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.Password:
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.WindowsPassword:
                    userCredentials.Add("Password", GetStringFromSecureString(credential.Credential));
                    break;
                case SecureStoreCredentialType.Generic:
                    userCredentials.Add("ConnectionString", GetStringFromSecureString(credential.Credential));
                    break;
            }
        }
    }

    return userCredentials;
}

Next switch to the *EntityService.cs class for your External Content Type i.e if your ECT was called Product the filename will be ProductEntityServiceClass.cs

Update the following method

public string GetConnectionStringWithCredentials()
{
    Dictionary<string, string> credentialsFromSecureStore = ReadCredentialsFromSecureStore();
    var connectionStringBuilder = new SqlConnectionStringBuilder(ConnectionString) { UserID = credentialsFromSecureStore["UserID"], Password = credentialsFromSecureStore["Password"] };
    return connectionStringBuilder.ToString();
}

with the following, this method now just returns the connection string

public string GetConnectionStringWithCredentials()
{
    return ReadCredentialsFromSecureStore()["ConnectionString"];
}

Now deploy the solution and it will be using the connection string from the Central Administration secure store, one thing which is worth noting is that when you go to change the credentials again you will not be shown what they were previously. You also need to make sure that the same secure store setup is used in each of your environments.

So there you have it not only can you use BCS Meta man to generate your c# code and configure the model with a few simple changes you can make the connection string configurable via the secure store.

BDC Meta Man and "The type initializer for 'Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection' threw an exception" error

Lightning Tools — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:20:46 GMT

We get quite a few support questions about having error regarding “Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection” while using BDC Meta Man – hopefully we’ll be able to clear this up with this post.

When you connect to Oracle using BDC Meta Man you may have this error raised “The type initializer for ‘Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection’ threw an exception”:

It’s not a reason to spread panic This error occurs as BDC Meta Man uses Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) in order to connect to Oracle database and you don’t have it installed on the machine. So you should just have ODP.NET installed on the machine where BDC Meta Man runs. In order to do that you should install Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Client (11.2.0.1.0) for Microsoft Windows (32-bit). It can be found here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/112010-win32soft-098987.html
Please ensure you select the 'Administrator' type of installation when you install Oracle client.

Social Squared Ideas–Getting Started

Lightning Tools — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:26:03 GMT

This simple walkthrough will get you well on your way to adding, voting and commenting on the Social Squared Ideas Web Part.

Download the beta here: Social Squared Ideas

Adding a New Idea:

Click on the ‘Add New Idea’ Icon
Add a Title and a Description for the new Idea
Click ‘Submit’
You will see the New Idea as at the top of the Latest Ideas List
The Idea will automatically have the vote of the person who submitted it

Vote for an Idea

Click on an Idea’s Title, this will show you the details of the Idea
The Orange arrow indicates that we have voted for the idea, if we click on the arrow again we will cancel the current vote, We can then down-vote the idea.
We can see the score is now at –1.

Adding a Comment

Click on an Idea from the Overview
Enter your Comment into the Textbox
Click ‘Submit Comment’
The comment will appear with the idea
The overview will also show there is a comment on the idea

Social Squared Ideas–Installation Guide

Lightning Tools — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:17:06 GMT

Social Squared Idea Web Part is a new Web Part from Lightning Tools for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 which allows you and your end users to submit ideas, vote and comment on them. This new Web Part is part of the Social Squared family and provides a fantastic way to engage with your users, increase SharePoint adoption and allow users to fully immerse themselves with SharePoint.

Download the beta here: Social Squared Ideas

Prerequisites

Social Squared Ideas
Social Squared Forums
Microsoft Sql Server
SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010

Installation

Download the Social Squared Ideas Web Part from here and extract the zip file.

Microsoft Sql Server

Run the SocialSquaredIdeas.sql against your Social Squared Database to create the relevant tables for Social Squared Ideas.

The tables added are:

IdeaComments
IdeaVotes
Ideas
Users (Shared with Social Squared Forums)

SharePoint

Deploy the ‘SocialSquared.SocialSquaredIdeas.wsp’ and activate the solution
Activate the Social Squared Ideas Feature on your Site Collection
Add the Social Squared Idea Web Part to a Web Part page where Social Squared Forums is currently used. It is in the Lightning Tools Web Part category, the Web Part is called ‘Social Squared Ideas Web Part’
When the Web Part is first added you will need to add your connection string to your Social Squared Database, click the link to open the Tool Pane
Enter your connection string, ie:

Data Source=.\sqlserver;Initial Catalog=SocialSquared;User Id=forumAccount;Password=password;
Press OK on the Tool Pane
The Web Part is now ready to use.

Input string was not in a correct format–BCS Errors

Lightning Tools — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:45:34 GMT

We are going to investigate the following issue in this blog post

Exception handed to HandleRuntimeException.HandleException System.ArgumentException: Input string was not in a correct format.Couldn't store <Veyron> in Model Column. Expected type is Int32. ---> System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

Right, what do we have this time…

We can see there is an error with the ‘Model’ column, it looks like we tried to pass in the value of “Veryon” but SharePoint was expecting an Int32. Lets get all CSI:SharePoint ….

If you have read any of the other BCS Error blog posts you hopefully would have learnt that SharePoint has come to expect an Int32 because we have a TypeDescriptor telling it that the ‘Model’ TypeDescriptor is of type Int32, lets have a look.

ahh yes, We can see the offending value. Lets check our SupercarEntity class and see what type it should be set to.

namespace LightningTools.TheTestBcsModel.BdcModel1
{
    public class SupercarEntity
    {
        public int CarId { get; set; }
        public string Manufacturer { get; set; }
        public string Model { get; set; }
        public uint TopSpeed { get; set; }
        public TimeSpan ZeroToSixtyTime { get; set; }
        public uint HorsePower { get; set; }
        public decimal Price { get; set; }
    }
}

In the above code we can see that ‘Model’ is in fact a ‘string’.

So what’s happening here is that SharePoint, when rendering the Web Part, is getting a SupercarEntity passed to it and it’s then trying to convert the ‘Model’ name (in our example “Veyron”) into an Int32 and it’s failing.

How to Fix

Select the TypeDescriptor in the BDC Explorer (as above) and change it’s type to ‘System.String’ to match the ‘Model’ property type in our C# code.

Deploy.

Rejoice.

Tired of getting BCS errors? Why not try...	BCS Meta Man
	BCS Meta Man provides the ease of use of a drag and drop interface with the power of Visual Studio. It can save you days in time by generating the code required by SharePoint 2010 to read and write back to your External Systems.

Cannot find Property with name 'x' on the parent object–BCS Errors

Lightning Tools — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:16:00 GMT

We are going to investigate the following Issue in this blog post

Exception handed to HandleRuntimeException.HandleException Microsoft.BusinessData.MetadataModel.InvalidMetadataObjectException: Cannot find Property with name 'HP' on the parent object. The parent object may be returned by the LobSystem (External System) or it is created to be sent to LobSystem as input. This Property is referred to by child TypeDescriptor with Name 'HP' and Id '11284' on Parameter with Name 'supercarsList' on Method with Name 'GetAllSupercars' on Entity (External Content Type) with Name 'Supercar' in Namespace 'LightningTools.TheTestBcsModel.BdcModel1'.

Click here, If you want to skip straight to the fix, otherwise, read on my friend, read on….

OK, lets have a look at this error. We can see that we have an issue with a missing Property. It mentions that this Property is referred to by a TypeDescriptor in our ‘GetAllSupercars’ Method.

If we have a look in the BDC Explorer we can see our TypeDescriptors under the GetAllSupercars method, so somewhere here is where our problem lies, the error says it’s the TypeDescriptor called ‘HP’ which is causing our problem.

OK, We know there is a property which is incorrect, lets start off by looking at what our' ‘GetAllSupercars’ Method is returning

If we look at the picture above, look underneath the ‘GetAllSupercars’ method we can see that ‘supercarsList’ is a Parameter, in our case it’s a return parameter (Finder Methods return data) , next down the tree we have ‘SupercarsList’ this is telling SharePoint that we are bringing back a collection of items ( a collection of our Supercar class), it’s a TypeDescriptor set as IsCollection = True and it’s type is

System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1[[LightningTools.TheTestBcsModel.BdcModel1.SupercarEntity, BdcModel1]]

Again we shall break this down.

System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1[[#CLASSNAME#, #MODELNAMESPACE#]]

so we have an Enumerable collection of the ‘SupercarEntity’ class which exists in the ‘BcsModel1’ namespace

To view this information click on ‘SupercarsList’ in the BCS Explorer and view the details in the properties window

and under ‘SupercarsList’ we have ‘Supercar’ we are now describing what each individual Supercar in the ‘SupercarsList’ looks like. If we click on it in the BDC Explorer again we can see the properties are slightly different, we are no longer talking about a collection because we are talking about just one Supercar

OK. Just to recap

We have a Return Parameter
We have a collection of Supercars
We have a Supercar

Now, under Supercar we are telling SharePoint what TypeDescriptors make up a Supercar.

Here we can see we have CarId, HP, Manufacturer, Model, Price, TopSpeed and ZerToSixtyTime.

We know from the ‘Supercar’ TypeDescriptor that we have told SharePoint that it’s Type is of one of our ‘SupercarEntity’ objects, it therefore makes sense that these TypeDescriptors match to each Property within the SupercarEntity class. When SharePoint calls our BCS Method it will hit our C# code, it will create a collection of our SupercarEntity objects and return them for rendering to the browser, SharePoint needs to know what these Properties are and how to handle them, this is why create TypeDescriptors for each property.

Lets have a look at our ‘SupercarEntity’ class

using System;

namespace LightningTools.TheTestBcsModel.BdcModel1
{
    public class SupercarEntity
    {
        public int CarId { get; set; }
        public string Manufacturer { get; set; }
        public string Model { get; set; }
        public uint TopSpeed { get; set; }
        public TimeSpan ZeroToSixtyTime { get; set; }
        public uint HorsePower { get; set; }
        public decimal Price { get; set; }
    }
}

if you’re quick on the ball you might notice something here…… got it yet?….. go on then I’ll tell you, HP doesn’t exist as a Property, in our code it is called ‘HorsePower’. Now the error message makes a bit more sense.

Cannot find Property with name 'HP' on the parent object.

We have defined a TypeDescriptor called HP which tells SharePoint to expect a Property called ‘HP’ but it doesn’t exist. We need to fix this.

How to fix

Option 1 - Change the TypeDescriptor Name

This is a fairly simple one, click on the ‘HP’ TypeDescriptor in the BDC Explorer and then view its properties

If we change the ‘Name’ from HP –> HorsePower, matching the property in our C# class, it should work. Lets deploy!

Success!

Bonus advice:

If you did still want the name to be displayed as HP instead of HorsePower you can set the properties as this

Notice that the TypeDescriptors name is still matching the name in the class but we have changed the Default Display Name to the value we want to use, check out how this looks now.

Option 2 – Change the Code Property

Open up the ‘SupercarEntity’ class and rename the HorsePower property to HP

By doing this it means we will also need to change any method which used the old method name

var supercarEntities = from car in externalSystemSupercars
           select new SupercarEntity()
           {
               CarId = car.Id,
               HP = car.HorsePower,
               Manufacturer = car.Manufacturer,
               Model = car.Model,
               Price = car.BasePrice,
               TopSpeed = car.TopSpeed,
               ZeroToSixtyTime = car.ZeroToSixtyTime
           };

Once all the methods are updated and the code builds OK, deploy!

<Phill />

Tired of getting BCS errors? Why not try...	BCS Meta Man
	BCS Meta Man provides the ease of use of a drag and drop interface with the power of Visual Studio. It can save you days in time by generating the code required by SharePoint 2010 to read and write back to your External Systems.

SharePoint Market and Lightning Tools 2007 to 2010

Lightning Tools — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 10:21:39 GMT

With the aim of being a more open company and sharing data others in the SharePoint community might find interesting we've decided to publish our revenue graph each quarter to help drive the debate around the SharePoint market. We are planning to publish an update each quarter.

Here's our first publication of our revenue graph which goes all the way back to August 2007 when the company was founded.

Some interesting points to note:

Our yearly revenue growth over the first two years was around 35%. In April last year we had a big drop in revenue which we put down to SharePoint 2010 being launched in April. The number of downloads of our trial products actually went up in this period as we launched 2010 versions of our products. But it seemed people weren't as willing to invest in SharePoint 2007 quite so much, and weren't ready to spend on SharePoint 2010 yet either. Putting this together with the annual dip for summer holidays in August you can see that April to September were pretty slow months. Things have rebounded though as people are looking for new tools for SharePoint 2010, and upgrades for their 2007 products.

There are certainly some regular monthly peaks and troughs. August is always very quiet due to people being away on holiday. December is always a very good month for us even though it is a month with only 3 working weeks.

Overall, despite a difficult 3-4 months in 2010 we are very happy with how things are going. Now we are looking to push on in 2011 to get back to our target of 35% growth.

How does this graph relate to your experience of the SharePoint market over the past 3 years?

Social Squared November Release

Lightning Tools — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:24:03 GMT

We’re very excited to bring you the November release of Social Squared – version 2.0.0.1, our forum tool for SharePoint that is perfect for large scale discussion boards. We’ve got lots of big and small improvements in this release, here are a few special ones:

Forum Tools Menu

The Forum Tools menu appears at the top right of the Social Squared Web Part and allows your users to get easy access to certain screens. These include:
Edit Profile – easier access so that users can set their signature or upload their profile picture to be used in the forums.

View Email Subscriptions – view all the email subscriptions that you are signed up for across the forums and topics. You can also easily delete subscriptions from this page.

View Recent Activity – shows all of the topics across Social Squared that have had posting activity over the last seven days.

Database Installer

Rather than expecting you to manually run SQL scripts to create or upgrade Social Squared databases, we’ve now created a database setup program for you to use:

Search

We’ve had the search box within the Social Squared web part for quite some time now. This allowed you to search within topics and posts. With this latest release we create a few new stored procedures as part of the database upgrade. These stored procedures can be used to create a Business Data Catalog Entity or Business Connectivity Services External Content Type – depending on which version of SharePoint you are running. You can then setup a Content Source within SharePoint Search to crawl this Entity/ECT so that Social Squared topics and posts can appear as part of the standard SharePoint Search results. If you’d like to connect SharePoint Search and Social Squared in this way please drop us an email at support@lightningtools.com and we can supply you with some further documentation.

Show Post Edit Information

When a user edits a post, a message in the bottom left of the post displays who edited it and at what time:

More Configuration Settings

From customer feedback we’ve added a number of configuration options that can be changed in the Forum Settings page:

Paging values – decide how many topics or posts to appear before the forum starts paging.
Show search box – allows you to show or hide the search box in the top right of the forum web part

Other Stuff

There are quite a few other small changes we’ve included in this release – please take a read of the Release Notes document which is part of the download.

Where to get it…

You can download the Trial version of Social Squared from here:

Social Squared Trial

Or if you are already a customer get the latest version from the Downloads page once you have logged in. Remember if you are upgrading to make sure you backup your Social Squared SQL database first

<nick/>

Export SharePoint List

Lightning Tools — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:51:52 GMT

SharePoint Lists are great. They are really easy to setup, customize and allow for very easy data input from your users. Sometimes however you need to get the SharePoint List data into another system so that people can work with the data with tools and knowledge they have. Although this can be achieved in a number of manual ways, having an automated way of exporting a SharePoint List is something a few of our customers have asked for. This is now something that can be achieved using the Lightning Data Masher and creating an export job.

In this walk through we’ll make use of a standard contacts list within SharePoint. Your SharePoint users are editing the information in the list, but you need to get it out into a Microsoft SQL Server table so it can be used in other legacy applications. Our database table is designed as such:

Once you have installed and deployed the Lightning Data Masher, browse to your SharePoint List and from the Actions menu click on ‘Create an export’ link

Select the data source type that you want to export to, and enter the connection string. Then click on the ‘Connect to Data Source’ button.

Enter a Title and Description for your job. Make this as meaningful as possible as if you have a number of import/export jobs running in a SharePoint site it is important to be able to distinguish them.

You can select to use an existing database table, or allow the Lightning Data Masher to create a new table for you the first time the export job executes. As our database table is already created we’ll use the ‘Use existing table option’

Now we need to map our SharePoint List columns to our database table. Click the ‘Add Column Mapping’ button for the amount of columns you wish to map.

Finally all you need to do is set how often you’d like the export job to run. Every time it runs it will add new rows of data into the database table and update any that may have changes.

Please check out our other walk through of how to Import to a SharePoint List.

<nick/>

Lightning Data Masher Deployment

Lightning Tools — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:25:03 GMT

The Lightning Data Masher is a SharePoint solution that makes it really easy to get data into and out of SharePoint lists. You can find out more about it here:

Lightning Data Masher.

You can download the Lightning Data Masher from here:

Lightning Data Masher Download.

Extract the zip file on your SharePoint Server and place the .wsp file onto your c:

Open a command prompt and move to the directory:

c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin

Execute the command:

stsadm –o addsolution –filename “c:\lightningtools.datamasher.wsp”

Please type the command yourself rather than copy and paste as this will ensure illegal ascii characters aren’t pasted in.

Once the stsadm command has successfully run open up Central Administration and navigate to Operations –> Solution Management.

Click the LightningTools.Datamasher.wsp and choose to Deploy Solution from the menu bar

From the following screen choose the web applications that you want to deploy to. You’ll need to deploy to each web application where you’d like to use the Data Masher solution.

Upon successful deployment we need to activate the Timer Job Web Application Feature. Still in Central Administration click Application Management –> Manage Web Application Features.

Ensure you have the correct web application selected in the top right corner of the view. When this is correct click the Activate button for the Lightning Tools Data Masher Job

We have one last thing to activate. Please browse to the SharePoint site where you want to run an import or export job and browse to Site Settings –> Site Features. Activate the Lightning Tools Data Masher Menu Items Feature

That’s it – you can now setup your first Data Masher import or export.

For a walk through of how to create an import to a SharePoint list check out this blog post:

SharePoint List Import

<nick/>