Which stereotyped operations are mandatory in my web service

Question

I'm trying to connect to an external resource using Sharepoint 2010 and connect to a WCF web service.

I want to know which stereotyped operations are mandatory for me to create in the web service to be able to use external content types with the Business Data Connectivity Services?

Answer 1

SpecificFinder

Finder

Your web service needs just 2 methods:

• find just one item - input parameter is unique ID (for SpecificFinder)
• find list of all items (or optionally filtered list)- if you want to use filters then input parameter can be some filter value (for Finder)

IdEnumerator

This operation is needed only if you are planning to crawl your data. Your method just needs to return all item unique IDs (same unique ID as for SpecificFinder)

Strange. I couldn't find any good online article on how to build WCF web service for BCD. This link have some useful info (it's for VS 2008/SP 2007).