Here comes another post on SharePoint 2010… you must have got tired by now browsing stuffs on the same topic… finding new features… seems like it’s going to change the world for MOSS developers… is it really?
Lets take a look at the concept of Composite Applications in SharePoint 2010. As claimed by Microsoft (MS), a set of following features are referred as Composites –
– Business Connectivity Services
– InfoPath Form Services
– External Lists
– Workflow
– SharePoint Designer
– Visual Studio
– API Enhancements
– REST/ATOM/RSS
The major thrust here is on easily developing Line of Business (LOB) applications without much coding. Sounds great as you can now simply connect to an external data source (like SQL DB) and get an external list out of that haivng all the features of a SharePoint list including Add/Edit forms, events, workflow, blah…blah…blah…
Now wait for a sec… Is is all? Can we really have a real world LOB application by getting the read/write access on an external data source?
My answer is not so affirmative. Take a look at the following constraints –
Aggregation queries – A list doesn’t support aggregation queries. In simple words, you can’t get simple stuffs like Count, Sum etc out of it. OK, there are workarounds but they all of those would come at a price of your site performance.
DISTINCT queries – Again, a list still doesn’t support a Distinct query (like a SQL statement). Simply means, get all the data from the list and than filter in memory… oh… Performance hit…
Full cross-list views – Though Joins are supported using designer at some level, you still can’t get a view having columns from multiple lists. This will be required in almost every screen that you would create in any real world LOB Application as the data source is bound to be relational.
Field-level security – At max you can implement security is per row basis, that too with a limit of having around 2000 ACLs per site collection. What if you want to secure data of just a column!!! Again, no way out without customizations.
Transactional updates – And above all, Transactions are still not supported in lists. So if you are updating multiple lists, do it at your own risk, as SharePoint 2010 doesn’t guarantee that all the updates would take place under an atomic transaction.
So, still wanna trying out Composites for LOB Applicaitons??? Best of Luck !!!
