Filling an SP column with SQL data

Question

As part of an internship assignment, I'm working with SharePoint 2013. I'm completely new to SharePoint in general.

Part of this assignment is a labeling system. The idea is that users can add labels to specific documents. There's two types of labels we want: Global and Personal.

Global labels are labels that anyone can add, and everyone can see. So if Pete and John both add a label to Document A, they both see both labels. The Managed Metadata feature in SharePoint seems to serve this purpose, to my relief. :)

Personal labels are specific to users, So if Pete and John both add a label to Document A, they only see the labels they themselves added. This is where my "problem" starts to arise. I wasn't able to find a way to apply the Managed Metadata for this feature, so I started looking at Apps or Solutions to fix this problem.

Right now, I'm looking at making a new SQL database, or a new table in the Content database and then have an App connect to that when the list loads, taking the appropriate labels according to the user that's logged in.

However, I can't find a lot of information on connecting to the SQL DB via a SharePoint App. Sadly I can only use Javascript in these apps. Does anyone have any experience with such a thing? Any help would be much appreciated!

Kind regards, David

Answer 1

You can use SharePoint Designer to create Business Connectivity Services (BCS / BDC) connections to SQL. There is a great article about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee819133.aspx (Article is about 2010, but applies to 2013)

Basically you end up interacting with SQL data as if it were SharePoint data.