BCS
and External List Limitations
1) Workflows cannot be
configured on External Lists
Unfortunately
as you can see you cannot actually run a workflow on an external list. You
neither have the option to define any workflows nor can you actually start one.
Now this is even if the workflow that you are thinking of defining will not
alter the External List item in anyway, doesn’t matter, External List = No
Workflows!
2) Cannot create
Information Management Policies
This
kind of makes sense. I mean you can really declare something a record or move
something to another location if you aren’t storing it within SharePoint but it
is worth knowing. No IMP’s means no barcodes, auditing, retention or
labels.
3) No versioning or
version history
You
cannot version or see version history for an External List. Now this does make
sense since in many external systems there is no concept of versions
4) No Inline Editing or
Datasheet View
Inline
editing allows you to edit list items from within the list view itself, kind of
a datasheet view for an induvidual item. Datasheet view is a way where you can
easily change metadata for multiple items. Neither of these are available.
5) No ratings
This
does suck but you cannot rate any items in an external list.
6) No ability to Export
to Excel, Create Visio Diagram, Open with Access or Open with Project
Some of
these are not available to all list types (Create Visio Diagram or Open with
Project for example) but all standard lists are able to be exported to Excel or
opened with Access. This is a real shame I think because exporting to Excel is
an oft use feature that will be missed by users.
7) No REST access
through ListData.svc to External Lists
Yep you
can’t access an External List though REST…
8) No RSS Feeds
No RSS
Feeds are available either
9) No Item Level
Permissions
You also
cannot configure item level permissions for External Lists.
10) No item or field
level validation
So as
you can see there are quite a few limitations that one should be aware of. The
thing that is concerning is that from a user’s perspective you can’t actually
tell that a list is external and without all these things being available this
can lead to some confusion. But it is out of the box functionality after all
and with a little SharePoint Designer and XSL magic you might not be in the
situation to expose external lists anyway.
11) Not everything from
Lookups
Unfortunately
the only thing that you can do a look up on in an external list is on the ID
column, anything else and you are out of luck.
12) No attachments
No
attachments either!
13) Warning: Too many
results have been returned. This result set may be incomplete or truncated.
When
you have thousands of items to pick from, the default behavior is to show the
first 200 items and there will be a warning out there. If you have yet to
define a filter for the ECTs, it is strongly recommended to always define at
least one filter on your ECTs for this scenario so that end users are able to
search the values with wildcard and get the items in the quickly narrow search
result.
References:-
