My Sharepoint Learnings

Sometimes even as the administrator, the error " Access Denied by Business Data Connectivity" might come when trying to open external list To resolve the issue Go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications -> Business Data Connectivity Service* -> [Your Entity] -> Set Permissions Then set the permissions as re quired  Then do an IISReset    

External lists in Sharepoint 2010 can be used to read/add/update/delete data in any external data- source. To create external list, a external content type has to be created. Refer the below links on msdn on how to create external content type How to create external content type Creating SharePoint Server 2010 External Content Type Associations with SharePoint Designer 2010 Sharepoint-2010-external-content-type-to-read-data-from-sql-server-using-sql-authentication-and-secure-store-service.aspx The below links explain on how to create external list How to create external list https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/sharepoint-2010-external-lists.aspx More about BCS functionality in msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557949.aspx

List forms can be customized using Infopath 2010. If the fields are kept mandatory, the red asterik sign appears on text fields. It would appear till the field is filled . Also alt text would come as 'Cannot be blank', which can be annoying at time. The alternative option would be to disable the Submit button till all the mandatory fields are filled. Click on Submit button, click on Manage Rules and Formatting Select the fields that are required and check on Disbale the control. For e,g, if in the form, say the fields, Name, Designation, Company Name are required, create the rule to evaluate-  Name is blank or Desingnation is blank or Company Name is blank. When the condition is true, Submit button is disabled. When all three are filled, the condition is false and therefore Submit buton is enabled.

In noteboard webpart, when there are no comments, there is text that appears as shown Add the following javascript in the page layout <script type="text/javascript">    $(document).ready(function() {             HideCommentText();      });     function HideCommentText() {             if ($("div :contains('There are no notes posted yet. You can use notes to comment on a page')").length == 0) {                 setTimeout(HideCommentText, 50);             }             else {                 $("div :contains('There are no notes posted yet. You can use notes to comment on a page'):last").html("");             }      }        </script> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you need to add some other text when no comments are there, you can add that to html tag , for e.g.  "Enter comments her