Changing the Sort order on BDC Actions in SharePoint

Question

We have a number of Actions defined in a BDC (Business Data Catalog) definition in SharePoint, and need to change the order they are displayed in the UI.

Within the Action defintion, there is a Position field, which we are specifying, however, the UI wants to display everything in Alphabetical order, which isn't what we are after.

An example of the Position section of the BDC Definition is shown below.

Do you know how this could be achieved successfully ?

<Action 
  Position="10" 
  IsOpenedInNewWindow="true" 
  Url="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22{0}%22"
  ImageUrl="/_layouts/1033/images/TAH/Google.gif" 
  Name="Google for Assured Name">
    <ActionParameters>
        <ActionParameter Index="0" Name="assured_name" />
    </ActionParameters>
</Action>

(PS I did consider putting this on SuperUser, but there is no BDC there, and there are a number of BDC related questions on here, so here it is... ;) )

Answer 1

You could do through the naming of your actions, for example:

• 01 This is the first action
• 02 This is the second action

A bit of a hack, but it should work.

Answer 2

There is no MSDN documentation for the Position attribute other than verifying its existence (see Action documentation) but it seems reasonable to assume that it should do what you require.

I suspect that the lack of documentation is due to this feature not being fully implemented.

Something that may work is to add leading spaces in the Name attribute. If BDC does not strip these spaces automatically you could use it to cause the alphabetical ordering to do what you require (the more leading spaces you have, the further down the list the action will appear). When rendered as HTML the spaces will likely be stripped.