Business Data Catalog Action

A Business Data Catalog Action is something that can be performed with the BDC data.  E.g. it might be that you want to look up a Product name on a Product Comparison site on the internet, or look up a companies location on Microsoft Live Maps.

It usually involves going to a specific URL and passing through a parameter e.g. ProductId.

To define an Action for the specified BDC entity your application definition file should contain the <Actions> tag, e.g.

<Actions>

<Action Name="BDCActionSample" IsOpenedInNewWindow="true" Url="http://www.ProductSearch.aspx?ProductID={0}&amp;ProductNumber={1}" ImageUrl="">

<ActionParameters>

<ActionParameter Name="ProductID" Index="0" />

<ActionParameter Name="ProductNumber" Index="1" />

</ActionParameters>

</Action>

        </Actions>

A Business Data Catalog Entity can contain as many actions as you want. Each of the actions should be declared within the tag.

A BDC Action has some attributes and child nodes that need to be declared in ADF. Here they are with their descriptions:

Name - Action name, which will be shown in the out of the box web parts,e.g. Business Data List, Business Data Action web parts.
Action name can be used also in BDC API, when you want to write some custom solution and use the appropriate BDC Action.

Url – Specifies the Url of the Action. Url is being parsed and appropriate action parameters’ values are being found and inserted from BDC data. Numbers in ‘{}’ brackets specify the index of where to insert the action parameters.

IsOpenedInNewWindow – Specifies whether the action should be executed in new browser window.

Each action can contain parameters, which are being used at URL parsing time.
Parameters must be defined in <ActionParameters> tag and must have Name and Index attributes.

If you are using BDC Meta Man to generate your application definition file, then when you want to create an action for your BDC entity you just simply need to edit the chosen entity and move to Actions tab. There you can use either “Custom Action Builder” or “Predefined Action picker” to create a new action.

After the Actions are added to ADF and it is imported to MOSS, you can use out of the box BDC web parts to display them, e.g. Business Data List web part.

And when you click on the action link you can see how the parameter is passed in as a query string value