Nice one! Thanks to Paul Galvin for pointing this to the SharePoint community. I am sure there will be few people(including me) writing SQL queries in the BDC definition file as shown in the MSDN documentation. SOME times we ignore to try to take that extra-mile and blindly keep doing in the same way as pointed in the documentation:)

Quote

BDC ADF and your friend, CDATA

I've noticed some awkward and unnecessary hand-encoding of RdbCommandText in some examples (including MSDN documentation).

I wanted to point out to newcomers to BDC that commands can be wrapped inside a CDATA tag in their "natural" form.  So, this awkward construction:

<Property Name="RdbCommandText" Type="System.String">
  SELECT dbo.MCRS_SETTLEMENT.id, dbo.MCRS_SETTLEMENT.settlement from dbo.MCRS_SETTLEMENT 
    WHERE (id &gt;= @MinId) AND (id &lt;= @MaxId)
</Property>

can be better represented this way:

<Property Name="RdbCommandText" Type="System.String">
  <![CDATA[
    SELECT dbo.MCRS_SETTLEMENT.id, dbo.MCRS_SETTLEMENT.settlement from dbo.MCRS_SETTLEMENT
      WHERE (id >= @MinId) AND (id <= @MaxId)
  ]]>
</Property>

</end>

BDC Primer

Intro to BDC

Here is the new patch for the Vulnerability in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 Could Result in Elevation of Privilege Within the SharePoint Site (942017)

Read more...

Also, read this from Ian Morrish (WSS Demo Blog), where he shares his experience about installing this patch.

-Guru

Use Relative node name within Node collection to access the properties. Do not use absolute path to access the values.

Let us say, you wanted to loop through the node collection and access the value for the child node for each node in the collection.

//Parent Node

XPathNavigator selectNode = tempXPath.SelectSingleNode("/my:ExpenseReport/my:TravelExpenses/my:travelExpense[" + i + "]", NamespaceManager);

//Do not use the below mentioned way(Absolute path) to access the values of the elements

//XPathNavigator tempNode = selectNode.SelectSingleNode("/my:ExpenseReport/my:TravelExpenses/my:travelExpense/my:travelExpenseCategory", NamespaceManager);

//Instead use relative node name like show below, to access the child node

XPathNavigator tempNode = selectNode.SelectSingleNode("my:travelExpenseCategory", NamespaceManager);

Hint: "my:travelExpenseCategory" is the child node under my:travelExpense

Note: If you use absolute path, you will always end up getting the Value from the first element, even though your cursor is at the specified(by variable i) element.

This may be not be a common mistake, nonetheless, I just wanted to share this piece.

Hope that helps!