Sharepoint 2010 : Business Connectivity Services Deployment Types (part 3) - Configure Indexing & Performing a Search

6. Configure Indexing

Now the external content type is fully configured and ready to get indexed. BCS indexing is easy in SharePoint 2010 compared to BDC in SharePoint 2007. Just add the BCS data source as a new search content source in the Search service application by navigating to the Manage Service Applications page in Central Administration. Click the Content Sources link in the navigation pane, which opens the Manage Content Sources page, shown in Figure 16. This page shows a list of all content sources.

Figure 16. Content sources page

Click New Content Source, and enter an appropriate name for the content source. Choose Line of Business Data as the content source type, and choose the relevant BCS application and external data source, as in Figure 17.

Figure 17. Creating a new content source for the LOB data ECT

Now select "Start full crawl", and click OK. It usually takes a few minutes for the indexer to update and start. When it goes back to idle, the external content source has been crawled.

7. Performing a Search

In order to test the search, a site that is configured to perform enterprise searches is required. Go to the Enterprise Search Center site, and search for a customer name or other contact detail (if you followed the Customers example). The search should now return results from the BCS, as shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18. Search results displaying external data

Clicking a search result from the BCS source opens it in the newly created profile page, as shown in Figure 19. The profile page automatically shows the metadata properties from the external content type.

Figure 19. Search results item displayed on the profile page for the ECT

After following this walkthrough, it should be easy to create and configure searching for other external content types as well.