How to create a hyperlink column in External List (BCS) ?

Question

We have an external list set up that gets data from an external content type through a web service (done through BCS). Everything works fine except the fact that one of the fields is supposed to show up as a hyperlink but it shows up as text. Any idea how
to modify this?
Example: The webservice object has 2 properties like this:
Public Class MyObject
Public string MyTitle{ get; set;}
Public string MyLink{ get; set;}
MyLink = "http://www.somewebsite.com"
The external list shows up with 2 coulmns MyTitle, MyLink. But MyLink is not clickable as a hyperlink. If you look at the list settings, the MyLink column is a text field.
Some of the answers I got suggested that system.uri is not supported in external list. What I ended up doing for now was to create a regular list (which supports hyperlinks) and dump data to it directly from the webservice ditching BCS.  But we
will be using BCS quite a bit and if some can give me a definitive answer on hyperlink support in external list, I would appreciate it. Is that a bug?

Answer 1

Hi,
I think you have to look into http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff407509.aspx and SPCustomFieldType. You might do this:
<TypeDescriptor Name="MyLink" TypeName="System.String">
<Properties>
<Property Name="SPCustomFieldType" Type="System.String">Url</Property>
</Properties>
</TypeDescriptor>
But I haven't been able to test it out.