Filters

To add a filter to a method, complete the following steps. Filters are useful to build views in Business Connectivity Services for business reasons such as Customers in ‘USA’. However, they are also a requirement if you have lots of data. For example, the Business Data Item Picker can only display a maximum of 200 items and therefore a wildcard filter would be required enabling users to filter the items to less than 200 items using the first few letters of a company name.

1. Select the finder method that you want to apply the filter against.
2. Click Add to add a filter.
3. Type a filter name.
4. Select the type of filter that you wish to create.
   

• Comparison. This filter type can be used to set a default value for the filter. For example, you may want to show all customers where the City column is equal to ‘New York’.
• Wildcard. Use when you would like to use a begins with filter. This is useful for the External Data Columns item picker. The picker can only display 200 items. Using a wildcard filter, you will be able to reduce the number of rows by setting a filter such as CompanyName begins with A.
• Limit. Use to only return a particular number of rows. The External list in SharePoint 2010 had a limit of 2000 rows. The limit is much higher in SharePoint 2013, but it still makes good sense to ensure that a limit filter is in place to avoid error messages when the data grows beyond the limits.

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