Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Using Matching Items in a SharePoint Business Data Column

I was using Nick Swan's excellent BDC Meta Man to build some definition files for sample SQL DBs to connect to SharePoint.

I was trying to get the Matching Items function working in the Business Data Column, so that a partial entry will return a set of possible matches....

bestmatch

On the main Finder method, generated by BDC Meta Man, I added a filter descriptor to support the UsedForDisambiguation switch, and this seemed to make the difference.

<FilterDescriptors>
<FilterDescriptor Type="Wildcard" Name="Customer Name" >
<Properties>
<Property Name="UsedForDisambiguation"
Type="System.Boolean">true</Property>
</Properties>
</FilterDescriptor>

</FilterDescriptors>