Creating External Lists: Troubleshooting

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

In this article
Unable to create External Lists due to permissions.
No Create or Update Forms generated for External List
A System.InvalidOperationException at runtime

This topic lists some common errors you might encounter when creating external lists.

Unable to create External Lists due to permissions.

To be able to create external lists, the user should have ManageLists permission on the SharePoint site. The user can get the ManageLists permission by being part of the Contributor, Designer or Home Owners group.

Also the user (or the impersonated user) must have rights to the BDC service.

No Create or Update Forms generated for External List

If the external list has fields that are not supported by Microsoft SharePoint 2010, then no create or update forms and actions will be created for the external content type. One option to resolve this is to upsize the forms to Microsoft InfoPath 2010 and design the forms to allow editing of the unsupported fields.

A System.InvalidOperationException at runtime

The reason for this exception can be one of the following:

  1. In the BDC model, two SpecificFinder method instances exist that return the same set of fields.

  2. In the BDC model, two SpecificFinder method instances exist and that have the same number of fields and they share the same number of fields with another method instance, such as a Finder.