How to Configure FAST Search for External Content Type

1. Create an external content types based on web service and make sure the GetList() method is created

2. In Fast Content SSA, create a content source with Content Source Type of “Line of Business Data” and select the name of the Business Connectivity Service Application and the external data type

3. FAST crawler will call the GetList() method to get all items and index all of them

4. In the search result page, we would have title and url link that’s not what we want them to be and here is the steps to tweak them:

a. Map the “Title” managed property to crawled property reflect the Title

b. Since we could not map url managed property, we need to create a new managed property such as BDCSourceUrl and map that to a crawl property that would  link user to get the page that presents the data

c. We also need to create a managed property DataSource and map that to a crawl property (a static value such as “BDCData”) comes from the web service

d. Then we need to modify the xslt to add logic to detect if the DataSource is from “BDCData” we will use BDCSourceUrl instead of “url”