Business Data Connectivity: error when saving External Content Type due to invalid assembly or codebase

Question

I am trying to create an external content type that will be connected to a SOAP webservice using SharePoint Designer. To do this, I added a WCF Connection in the Operation Designer section with the following configuration:

The data source explorer shown the web methods available in the web service so I mapped each method with its specific operation (read list and read item).

However I am getting the following error when I try to save the external content type:

An unexpected internal error occurred in the Business Data Connectivity Shared Service: The given assembly or codebase was invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131047)

I've already tested a few things:

• Creating a simple ASMX web service that mimicks the real one by giving the same operations. I could save it as an external content type with success, yet I still get the error when trying to use BDC with the original web service.

• Connecting to the real web service using web references with C# managed code to test if it is not malformed; I managed to consume the web service through it without any problem.

• Deleting the Business Data Connectivity service application and creating it again; didn't solve the problem.

Any idea about how to solve this issue?

Answer 1

This problem was occurring due to the name of the data source. The WCF Connection creation dialog has a field called "Name (optional)". If it is not filled, it will set the data source name as the same value as the service metadata URL.

SharePoint seems to have trouble when dealing with some of the characters present on the service URL and ends up giving this poor error message. Strangely this error didn't occur when I saved it with the operations mapped to the dummy web service I created.

To solve it, I just had to delete the data source and create it again, but this time with the name field filled.

After doing this and mapping the methods to the operations, I could save the external content type without any problem.