For the past year I’ve been working on an enterprise search solution for a Canadian federal government client employing SharePoint Server 2013 / 2016 and integrating with line-of-business data via Business Data Connectivity Services (BCS, formerly BDC) with a BDC .NET Connector. The elements of this solution, notably SharePoint Search and Business Data Connectivity Services, encompass a complex set of technologies which would easily occupy a blogger for months if not years. On this occasion we’ll delve into one small but important part, creating BDC Profile Pages in a host header / host named site collection context.

Some time ago one of my colleagues reported an issue in our development and testing environments; when we attempt to generate a profile page for an external content type in the BDC service application:

We get this warning:

Close up:

With the text:

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Traditionally as a SharePoint developer or designer your skills and toolkit were quite different from those of a standard web developer. While that used to be essential to your success, in today’s web-centric world as you transition your skills it might mean you overlook the obvious when troubleshooting. Recently I was helping a developer colleague resolve one of those eponymous “Sorry, something went wrong” messages that SharePoint 2013/2016 is so famous for, when it drove home this point: Always start with the web-dev basics!

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