SharePoint and Indexing a Business Data Catalog
March 27, 2009
SharePoint user? If so, you may want to read and save “Business Data Catalog (BDC) incremental Crawls and How to Test” here. The article understates the performance issues but provides some useful tips. For me, the most important comment was:
But how does the indexer know which BDC records have changed? For it to know this we have to implement a property in our Entity called the __BdcLastModifiedTimestamp. Nice name huh! Now a small admission also. Whenever we describe the IdEnumerator method we always say that it only returns the primary key fields for an entity. This is generally true – except for when you want to implement an incremental crawl. If you want to do this, your IdEnumerator method must also return a DateTime field that will indicate to the indexer when it was last modified. The indexer can then compare this to the previous LastModified value it holds and if it is different, it can index the entire row of data.
If this seems like a bit of extra work for a routine task your are correct. Updating an index should be a click or two, then the system happily ensures that the index is fresh. SharePoint is a work in progress. I assume that when Fast ESP is available, these strange manual workarounds will no longer be needed. One can hope for the basics.
Stephen Arnold, March 27, 2009
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