Sharepoint BDC tips, hints and errors

A couple of tips/hints I’ve stumbled over whilst working with the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor to create line of business (LOB) application definition files for use in Sharepoint MOSS 2007.

1. By default, BDC DE doesn’t create a specificfinder method. You’ll need one for use in Sharepoint.
2. When creating a finder method (for use with e.g., a Wildcard search) make sure the wildcard character is defined – which is done in the very topmost node of the tree (i.e, the LOB node.) Why it’s there, I have no idea but without it you might find the query runs, you just get no results.
3. You can create multiple filters on a single finder method, just make sure you specify default values and update your e.g., SQL select statement so instead of e.g., where name like @name you change it to where name like @name and date_create > @date_create_gt… etc.
4. If you get this error “The provided stream is invalid (not of type IDataReader, IEnumerable or IEnumerator). Parameter name: rawAdapterEntityInstanceStream” first thing to check is that your return parameter is the last one specified.. i.e., you can have multiple in parameters, but the return one has to be last in the list. (Ridiculous I know, this is XML for chrissakes, but hey ho, it’s Microsoft…). The way to fix this is export your ADF to an XML file, then manually adjust the order of the parameters, then reimport to BDC DE
5. If you make manual changes to your ADF file and want to reimport to BDC DE, you have to delete the original definition from BDC DE first.

I might add to this as I find more. For reference, there’s a really good series of articles on basic BDC stuff, right about here.