Using BCS and External Content Types to create Publishing Pages

Question

I'm starting a new SharePoint 2010 web content management project where a portion of the site's content is driven by an external system (SQL Server based). Think employee bios... The external system is the system of record for this data, we need to expose it (read only) in publishing pages on the site - for each record, we want to create a publishing page.

I've done some research but haven't come across examples of using BCS and ECTs in publishing sites. Considering this approach and hoping to get some feedback on it from the community:

• Create External Content Type to represent the data in the external system
• Use an item event receiver to create a publishing page for new records
• The item event receiver might also update a term store for tagging use elsewhere
• The publishing page layout would be based on the external content type

I'm concerned that one ore more of the above things might not even be possible with External Content Types - or have serious limitations.

Would appreciate any thoughts on this approach vs. directly accessing SQL from web parts on a publishing page based on a query string parameter.

Thank you

Answer 1

The use of BCS for external content types and lists is more suitable for surfacing external data in a familiar format that business users can consume - a SharePoint List. I don't see much of an advantage using it the way you are suggesting.

Have you considered using BCS to augment user profiles to pull in the bio information as a mapped property? This would provide the information as part of the native User Profile, and you could easily access it with the SharePoint object model from a custom web part to render a custom profile page.

3 approaches I might consider taking would be:

a) - Use BCS to import the SQL data as a mapped property into User Profiles - Create a custom search page to render the User Profile/Bio using XSL with a query parameter

a) - Use BCS to import the SQL data as a mapped property into User Profiles - Use a query-parameter driven page with custom web parts that read and present the User Bio

c) - Wrap the custom user profile data in a RESTful Web Service - Use a query-parameter driven DFWP with the XmlDataSource and XSL to render the content

I lean towards a) because it is leveraging native features of the SharePoint platform the way they were designed to be used. Augmenting User Profiles with BCS allows them to surface through People Search, and search pages can be customized without have to resort to custom code with web part configuration and XSL.