Connect to database directly without BDC

Michael — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:26:05 GMT

Lightning Tools released the Web Part, which allows you to connect to database directly, without using BDC. Having direct access to tables, stored procedures is that functionality with WSS and MOSS Standard didn’t have and a lot client suffered from that, developed their own solutions.

Now LT Data Viewer Web Part provides you all necessary information

The Lightning Tools Data Viewer Web Part can save you time and money as it stops the need for developers to write custom code and allows your end users to easily display and format the data they need to see.

The LTDVWP provides the following benefits:

1. No need for SharePoint Designer. The LTDVWP is configured within the browser.
2. Allows for Integrated Security or provided Username and Password
3. Allows for connection to SQL, Oracle and Access (accdb & mdb) via the configuration of properties. (No need for Connection Strings)
4. Connect directly to Tables/Views and Stored Procedures
5. Supports Aggregate Functions such as Count, Min, Max, and Sum
6. Allows for Conditional Formatting on Cells or Rows
7. Filtering of data
8. Caching of Data
9. Update, Delete, and Insertion of Data
10. Web Part Connections

SharePoint BDC Permission Inheritance

Michael — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:23:00 GMT

In these days I was working on the search issue in SharePoint 2007, which led me to the interesting behaviour of BDC Permissions.

We had the following errors in MOSS crawl log

bdc2://<guid>
The parameter is incorrect. (Could not create a security identifier for the identity '<domain>\<user.name>. This identity may have been deleted.)

What it means, is that search can’t crawl BDC content, because owner of the BDC application was removed.

Diagnosing this issue we found that user who imported BDC application doesn’t work at us anymore, and he was removed from Active Directory. So, that’s why BDC not accessible.

You can find the full descriptions of this behaviour there http://k2distillery.blogspot.com/2008/06/bdc-crawl-missing-security-identifier.html

So, the workaround promised be simple – just “Manage Permissions” for this BDC application, removing user from list of BDC Entry owners and from BDC Catalog Permissions. That’s what described in that article. But reality is far from it :)

The actual behaviour is whenever you navigate to “Manage Permissions” you got “Error: Access Denied" screen. The surprising part of this is that my user is

Farm Administrator
SSP Site Owner and SSP administrator
have all rights in SSP Personalization Permissions
have all rights in BDC Catalog Permissions

Well, I have all permissions, but I still can’t access user’s BDC application.

I didn’t know one thing – BDC Catalog permissions are INHERITED permissions. It means that you need explicitly copy all BDC permissions to your user :) Really bizarre.

Solution: Navigate to BDC Catalog Permissions page, select your admin user and click “Copy all permissions to descendants”. Detailed instruction is there: http://blogs.msdn.com/mutaz/archive/2008/12/14/ssp-admin-cannot-manage-existing-bdc-applications.aspx

Hail to Mutaz, helping to nail down this issue

Update: http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2008/12/17/windows-server-2008-wfe-will-not-allow-large-file-uploads.aspx

Mirror: SharePoint BDC Permission Inheritance

SharePoint world of ECM and Information Management : BDC

Connect to database directly without BDC

SharePoint BDC Permission Inheritance