Planning Step 1: Identify External Content Types and Associations Involved in Your External System
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010
Assuming you already know the integration scenario and solution scope, the first task in working with the Code Sample: Sample Orders ASP.NET Web Service is to identify the list of external content types that users must access from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites, Microsoft Office 2010 applications, and from custom applications.
For the Sample Orders Web Service sample, we identified the following solution requirements to demonstrate several complex metadata authoring concepts:
The ability to display a list of customers in a SharePoint list and in Outlook 2010.
The ability to create, update, and delete customers from SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Outlook 2010.
The ability to list child customers for each customer on a SharePoint site
The ability to list addresses for each customer on a SharePoint site
The ability to list orders for a customer in a given region on a SharePoint site
The ability to list line items for each order on a SharePoint site
These requirements lead to the following external content types and associations:
Customer
Address
Region
Order
LineItem
An association linking customers with child customers
An association linking customers with addresses
An association linking customers and regions with orders
An association linking orders with line items