Gemini Webservice interacting with SharePoint Business Data Catalog

At work we use the Gemini Project Issue Tracker every day. We’ve a very small team, so we’re able to get away with the free license for now. Upper management reviews the status of tickets and bugs and the overall status of any project at any given time. We also use SharePoint to collaborate and share documents throughout our company. We recently upgraded to MOSS 2007 (SharePoint 2007) and with this install comes the Business Data Catalog (BDC). This allows us to link back end systems to MOSS. MOSS provides a good toolset of web parts that YOU DO NOT have to write yourself. If your application exposes a web service or database connectivity, MOSS can consume. This means tons of development time, saved, IF. you can figure out how to write the BDC Application MetaData (XML).

I decided that we should try to implement Gemini into MOSS. Again, to my dismay I had to write some really nasty looking XML, this is the “Application MetaData”. The documentation on the BDC MetaData Model isnt that “great” (IMHO) and its difficult and frustrating to write the XML MetaData. Who wants to sit around and write XML all day anyway? bleh. Boring…

I got MOSS to connect to Gemini through the webservice. This example only displays a few actions to prove that we can get data from Gemini.

It allows you to select a Project ID (int) and then the actions of “View Project” and “Open Gemini” will be presented.

How To

To get this to work, you’ll have to replace this text: http://PathToYourGeminiSite/webservices/gemini.asmx?WSDL with the actual path to your Gemini Site.

Then import it into your BDC and use the Business Data Action Web Part to display the data.

Screen shots

Application Metadata Info Page

Page as user sees it once the web part is live.

Clicking the “View Profile” link will allow you to see data that is returned from the Web Service (as seen below):

Clicking “Open Gemini” will take you to the Gemini home page in a new window. Clicking “Open Project” will open that projects page in a new window.

Download the MetaData File.

GeminiMetadata.zip (1.07 KB)