Using SharePoint OOTB search with external DB

Question

Hi All,
I am using SharePoint OOTB search to search for documents inside a document library. The document library has all the data except for two cases:
1- Value stored in SharePoint document library as ID but the actual name is in an external DB (example: Document 100 has an organization code 7200, the list of all organizations is in an external DB)
2- A look-up that exists in another SharePoint list with IDs only (example: a document 100 can belong to project 55, 66, 77). DocProject list that describes the 1:M relation is in the SharePoint list, however the project information for project 55, 66, and
77 are in an external DB.
When the user tries to search for a document by project or organization name, an external database should be involved to get the correct documents that fall under the search criteria.
Can you please advice me on how can this be implemented? What are the options that I have?
Many thanks

Answer 1

Hi Ashish,
Thanks a lot for the prompt reply and wish you a pleasant year.
Unfortunately this scenario is not working in our case!
In fact we have no problem at all if we added a new field to a list and configured it as a lookup field to an existing SharePoint list and then migrated its data and started to search by lookup name instead of ID.
Our problem still exists as we fail to repeat the same scenario with a list that exists in an external database and was shown in SharePoint using Business Data Catalog. Whenever the lookup list is an external DB list, we can not use the name instead of the
ID in search (even after we migrate the data, mark the field as a lookup field, and run full crawler)
We also searched the re-index feature but found that it is a feature in SharePoint 2013 while our version is SharePoint 2010.
Kindly advice as I am afraid we are missing a step or a certain configuration that makes SharePoint behavior different with BDC lists. Here are the detailed steps that I followed:
1- From Central Admin, Add BDC service to SahrePoint
2- Create a .net solution (SharePoint features BDC) that uses a web service that calls an Oracle stored procedure to get the data (full list) or (single Item) and maps them to BDC.readlist and BDC.readitem
3-Deploy the custom BDC solution to SharePoint
4- From SharePoint designer, create external content type that uses the custom BDC solution
5- In the created external content type, added two operations (New Read Item Operation) and (New Read list operation).
6- Create external list from the external content type
7- Add new column to the original list as a look up column with the property (Get Information from) set to the external list
8- Migrate data to the newly added column using SharePoint object model
9- Run full crawler job
10- Try the search, when searching by ID we get results, when searching by name, we get NO results!
Many thanks,