BDC Column with Ability to Select Multiple Values

Question

Use Case:

We are creating a storage location for technical product articles. These will be SharePoint publishing pages. Each page will have metadata assigned to it to make it searchable by properties. The possible values for one of the columns (Part Number) could potentially be sourced by our ERP system. I'd like to do this to eliminate the possibility of free-text entry errors, but there are probably over 10,000 parts so a drop-down list isn't feasible.

 

Ideal Situation:

The end user enters the part number and clicks a button to verify it against a BDC entry from our ERP system. If they weren't sure on the part number they needed, they could do a lookup from that metadata entry screen. They'd need to have the option to add multiple part numbers as one technical product article could reference multiple part numbers.

 

Question:

Is BDC an option for all of this or am I looking at a custom metadata solution? I thought I heard along the way that BDC only supported one value choice, but I couldn't find a verification for that in the forums.

 

Thanks.

Answer 1

Murray, I was happy to find your post.

Our client needs this functionality as well -- we have built a large and growing repository of indexed PDFs for one of their call centers, as reference material for the operators to use. However, some of our BDC-driven meta fields really require the ability to tag with multiple values and not just one each time.

I am working with an outside programmer to see how best to get around this problem. If we solve this problem, that introduces a new one, which is that hyperlinks from the call manager database into our SharePoint application make use of the Query String filter web part, which will now need to be rewritten slightly. Instead of an "=" operator for the logic of the filter, we would (with the multiple BDC value problem solved) need more of a "LIKE" logic, so that a single value passed in the query string will make sense and filter properly on a library item that has multiple values in place.

Please let me know if you have any success with this? It seems like one of those fine-grained features that might only be of use to 5-10% of serious MOSS developers...

Thanks,
Neal

Answer 2

Hi,

Did anyone of you solve this issue? If yes, please share with me since i am also looking into samething.

Thanks

KPD