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Sharepoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services

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  • 16-05-2011 4:21pm
    #1
    John_Mc
    Registered Users Posts: 2,791 ✭✭✭


    Quick question regarding BCS - does anyone know how it works?

    I'm mainly interested in how it knows when to refresh the data connections. Is there a SQL cache dependency setup which triggers a refresh when data in the DB is updated? Perhaps it's done on a schedule?

    Have done a bit of googling but can't find anything other than a "how to setup BCS" etc

    Thanks in advance,
    John


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    #2
    stevenmu
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 9,689 Mod ✭✭✭✭stevenmu


    I believe caching is no longer handled in the BCS and instead is to be done by the client connecting to BCS. A call directly will always return fresh data. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556385.aspx for details. I'm not entirely sure if for e.g. the standard API's count as a client handling the caching for you, or if you need to make specific API calls etc.

    The only development I've done so far with BCS accessed the data using the client object model to pull data from a list based off an external content type. It seemed to meet my needs fine, performance was more than adequate and fresh data was shown when the source was updated.

    I guess it's a bit harder on developers than having the caching managed by BCS, but it's a million times better than the way BDC had to be refreshed.


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    #3
    John_Mc
    Registered Users Posts: 2,791 ✭✭✭John_Mc


    Hi Steve,

    Many thanks for your reply. Does the BCS refresh on demand - i.e when you load an external list on a page, the BCS queries the external data source?

    I assumed it was on a scheduled/cached basis...


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    #4
    stevenmu
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 9,689 Mod ✭✭✭✭stevenmu


    It seems to, I've done updates to the data source and when I've opened the list again it was updated too. I can't remember how quickly I did that though, so there could be some amount of caching done. There definitely wasn't the need to manually refresh the data like with a BDC column.


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    #5
    John_Mc
    Registered Users Posts: 2,791 ✭✭✭John_Mc


    stevenmu wrote: »
    It seems to, I've done updates to the data source and when I've opened the list again it was updated too. I can't remember how quickly I did that though, so there could be some amount of caching done. There definitely wasn't the need to manually refresh the data like with a BDC column.

    Ok great stuff, once again thanks for your help!


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