Problems developing an App Part

Question

I am developing an AppPart in Sharepoint 2013 and I am having problems when connecting to an external list. The following ways have been my attempts:

• Accesing a external list with an app using the External Content Type. After deploying my new App (called "Hello Administrator") and browsing it, if I go to http://app-12313123.myfirstapp:3000/Lists/myList in order to load the external list, I get a "LobSystem (External System) returned authentication error" when the pages load asynchronously.
• Trying to generate an External Content Type using Designer. First going to Data Sources I am prompted for the connection to the DataBase but I don't know how to build the connection string and I get an authentication error, not being able to generate the connection to access the external lists.

Any ideas? Thank you very much!

Answer 1

I'm a little confused by what are you trying to achieve, because you mention App Part and BCS via SPD, etc.

Just to be on the same page: App Parts are only to be used for SharePoint Apps. If you plan to use SharePoint Apps with BCS you can only create a "App-Scoped BCS", in other words BCS models can be scoped to apps for SharePoint, with the connection information being defined and stored separately from the app-scoped BCS model in BCS connections - in other words scoped to External Content Type having data source of type OData.

BCS Connections can be specified in 2 ways - via the Secure Store or having connections separately packaged.

Basically, if you go via SharePoint Designer, you already create the model on the farm, and connection is in it - go for Secure Store for the authentication - the create standard Web Parts to access it or use the out-of-the-box (Enterprise license required) If you still want the create a SharePoint App, is more complicated, but find here an example http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SharePoint-2013-Create-ffc9af9f