CRM 2011 Data as an External List

Question

Hi,
Im having trouble creating an external data source in sharepoint designer 2010. I would like to consume the web services provided by CRM 2011 on Premise. 
http://crm.domain.com/Organization/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc
I have tried many different types of URL but whenever i try to connect i get an error saying that the url did not return a valid description of an XML Web service.
I've tried many different URLs, ive added ?wsdl  and ?wsdl=wsdl0 etc. but i always get the same error.
If i put the URL in the browser I can see all the XML without any problems.
Has anyone encountered this before?
Right now im looking into creating a BDC Model from Visual Studio instead but i was really hoping to be able to do this in SPD.
Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi, Sorry about not replying earlier. 
Been busy. In the end this is how I got a list of CRM data into Sharepoint. 
I actually took two different approaches. 
One was to use sharepoint designer to access the Secure store key i created, and pull the data from the CRM database. Then i formated it in sharepoint designer. This is a supported approach. And if you use the filtered views provided in the CRM 2011 database
you will be able to get the security features on the data that you setup in CRM (for the user that you have configured the secure store key for ). 
That is the easy way. The hard way is to create a new BDC Project for sharepoint. Then you can create a model, in XML that represents the various opperations you will do on the data. This will include, unique find, list, update, delete, etc.
Then you have to go and create those methods in the service class that comes with the model. (this is where you will write code to get the data from CRM)
My suggestion is to get that working first and load in some static data in the code. I had lots of headaches in this part especially with the model. 
Say thats working and you were able to create a list that gets data from the new content type then the next thing is to go back into the code and add a web reference to the WSDL file from the CRM 2011 developer resources section on your installation. This
didnt work out of the box for me i had to read a lot of blogs to iron out little bits in the autogenerated code that didnt quite work for me. Also any .net 4 stuff is ruled out as well. But i managed to get the service object created with some CRM credentials,
(probably best to use the secure key again here to avoid having creds in the source, and to decouple any administrative tasks) 
Next you can build queries and pull the data straight out of the CRM webservice. I would suggest starting with the list function ( its probably called something else ) and write the code to pull out all the items you want in the list, etc. Then move on to
the other crud functions. 
If you are looking for performance for reporting, etc. then use the filtered views, its faster and has less overhead than the webservice. 
REST is also an option but i think you can only pull 50 items at a time, so you will have to write the code around that. A bit masochistic though.
Its much easier to get the webservices working with silverlight as you can use the sdk libs i think. but i remember there being a problem with authentication and having to re-enter user/pass and stuff like that.
Ill try and answer any specifics if i can. .
cheers