Best Practices

• Use any site template, including the Blank Site template, for creating external content types.

• Define associations for external content types that have relationships with others, such as the relationship between customers and orders.

• If using External Data columns in SharePoint lists, periodically click the Refresh icon to ensure that the most current data is displayed in your SharePoint lists.

• For simple databases with little or no logic on various columns or tables, SharePoint Designer may be a useful tool for creating write-back operations. However, for larger or more complex databases, use a more advanced tool, such as Visual Studio 2010 for building write-back operations.

• When including Create or Update operations on an external content type, it is important to create these operations before creating the external list in SharePoint.