Ryan McCutchen

The Business Definition Editor is a cool utility that comes with the Office Server 2007 SDK. It allows to you to create an application definition for the BDC in a gui environment, and creates all the xml goo automatically - click here for more

For those you like me who immediately installs an app, and then begins to click wildly hoping for everything to work out should take note that the BDC Definition Editor DOES need to be installed on your web front-end server running SharePoint. Of course this is obvious to some, especially those who take the time to go through the READ ME file before jumping in, but I don't feel like too much of an idiot because I saw several posts on the interwebs of users complaining of issues with the tool, and no one mentioned this obvious fact. So I installed it on my dev box (without MOSS) and quickly discovered that I could not connect an existing web service, but I could get there from my browser.

If the app is installed on a box not running SharePoint, and you attempt to connect to a web service url when clicking Add LOB System,you get - "Error Downloading Web Service". Install the editor on my SharePoint box and life is good. I did see someone suggest that you can copy the wsdl file local, change the connection settings, and it will work, but I cannot verify that.....Just a tidbit for those like me who click first and read later.