Sharepoint 2013 : Business Connectivity Services - Export and Import Models

You can spend an immense amount of time creating Business Connectivity models in development, get them just right, and then want to deploy the model to staging and production. Fortunately, you do not have to repeat the configuration steps again for each deployment—this is where export and import models come in.

You created an external content type for Employees in the Adventure Works database and an external list to surface the employees in SharePoint. At this point, I shall assume that you followed my examples and were able to render the Employees list, and are therefore ready to export your model for use in another environment.

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the link to manage service applications.
3. Select the Business Connectivity Services application in the list.
4. Click the Manage icon on the ribbon.
5. In the view section of the ribbon, change the drop-down control to show BDC models (Figure 1).

   

   Figure 1. BDC models

   A BDC model is an XML file that contains all of the Business Connectivity Services information for a given data source. In Figure 1, see that SharePoint created a model when you created a new data source to the Adventure Works SQL database from SharePoint Designer. You can save this file to disk and open it in a text editor to see the XML. BDC model files are inherent from the legacy Business Data Catalog in SharePoint 2007. Back in those days, you had to create the XML file yourself, or use a third-party tool, such as BDC Meta-man. Although Business Connectivity Services still uses the BDC model file, the capabilities of the service greatly enhance that of BDC.

6. Check the check box next to the BDC model.
7. Click the Export icon on the ribbon.
8. Choose the file type to export and the various advanced attributes to include or exclude from the export (Figure 2).

   

   Figure 2. Export BDC Model

9. Click the Export button to save the file locally to disk.

With a BDC model exported to disk, you can now import the model into another environment, using the Import icon in the Business Connectivity Services application.