SharePoint for DBA’s Part II at SALSSA

Last night I presented SharePoint for DBA’s Part II to the San Antonio League of SQL Server Administrators.

Slides

The slides from the presentation are available for download and viewing on SlideShare.

Screencast of part of Demo 2

I recorded a screencast of one of the demos from the presentation.

Video Note: I recorded the video above because during the presentation I ran into an error which prevented the creation of the External List from the External Content Type and I wanted to show how the demo should have ended last night. More detail on the error I received and how to solve it is below.

No Finders Error Solution

While creating the external list I received the following error every time I tried to create the list. I also received various other errors which came from rushing trying to recover from this one I hadn’t seen before.

The error states “No Finders available in the View Group associated with the Specific Finder (Read Item) operation.” That alone wasn’t enough information for me to figure out what was wrong with my Read Item operation at first glance.

A quick search turned up the solution on MSDN Forums. “Try making sure that the columns in your Read List and Read Item Operations are the same.” This indeed is the key and it’s easy to reproduce the error condition once you have this tip.

To generate the error screenshot above, I just removed one column from my Read Item Operation so it didn’t match the list of columns in my Read List Operation and attempted to create a new External List from the External Content Type. Simply adding the same column back restores us from the error condition.