Business Data Connectivity

I came to a requirement wherein I was supposed to get data from an 3^rd party portal using API’s and then bring them to SharePoint server.

The first approach that I finalized was just to make BDC solution that will get data from 3^rd party portal and will deploy it to SharePoint.

How to Create BDC solution in SharePoint?

I found below link that is having really great description about hot to create and deploy the BDC solution to SharePoint.

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/hung123/creating-business-data-connectivity-service-using-visual-studio-2010/

After creating an POC I came to know that BDC model cannot be deployed on Multi tenant farm.

So what can be done next? After some amount of googling I came to know that we can create BDC solution using WCF services also.

So I created a WCF service solution that acted as a wrapper that used to fetch data from the portal.

We can them publish that service to IIS or Server and use the service reference in to SharePoint designer in order to create and External List. Below is the link that helped me for doing this.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff953200(v=office.14).aspx

Conclusion:

             1.       You cannot deploy BDC model that is created in Visual studio to Multi-tenant farm.

             2.       WCF services can be used as BDC solution in SharePoint environment independent of                         whether it is Multi-tenant or not.

Regards,

Keyur Pandya