Beware! Business Data Connectivity is case sensitive for database field names

An unforeseen problem with a major impact was uncovered the other day. We have set up an external content type querying an SQL server database table. During a simple change to this table it was recreated with upper case field names, where it earlier had a mix of lower and upper.

This broke the External content types connected to this table. No external list data could be displayed, no external data columns in lists or libraries could be updated, and no actions (like view profile page) would function.

In SharePoint Designer configuration of operations (here the Read List Operation) it is obvious that the original configuration is not able to update with the 'new' column names. Both new and old formats are visible, but the original configurations are locked in and unavailable.


The only way to solve this problem was to recreate the table with the original column name formats. After doing so everything went back to normal.

Henning