How to programaticaly export SharePoint 2010 BCS list into excel

Question

How to programaticaly export SharePoint 2010 BCS list into excel

Answer 1

I think it is not possible, it is one of BCS limitation, see chakradeep article on BCS limitataions

http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/BCS-Limitations.aspx

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Ashish Kanoongo, MCP, MCSD, MCTS

Answer 2

Ashish is correct that this is not possible out of the box. However, External Lists are accessible through the SPList object, so you could access the data through SPList and then use the OpenXML file formats to put the data into Excel.

Scot

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Author, Professional Business Connectivity Services
Author, Inside SharePoint 2010 Blog, www.shillier.com
Twitter, @ScotHillier
SharePoint Trainer, Critical Path Training

Answer 3

Scot, can you elaborate a bit on this? I too am trying to export to excel the data from an external list. How do you get from SPList to OpenXML to excel??

Answer 4

That is correct, the External list
cannot be exported , but it can be accessed like Soct mentioned. (PS Soct’s
presentation on BCS was an inspiration… THANK YOU )

The trick here is to create an
External List on a site (somehow) , that is the only you will ensure that the
(finder method ) is executed for all items on the external list.

Now with that said, you can then do
most analytics using SSRS straight against that list , but if you plan to use
any other code (custom C# or SSIS package etc.) to access the data , I
recommend you access the LOB data directly as coding against BCS to get to the
LOB system is just waste of time and adding complexity.

I am hoping Microsoft get that
feature in the new release of Office.

Best of luck

George Gergues

SharePoint Architect