Q: How do I make filter descriptors on an entity in my BDC model display as I want them to?

By Stefan Kowalewski, Tomek Stojecki, and Ethan Wilansky

Problem: You’ve implemented filter descriptors on an entity in your BDC model and created an association to that entity. When you open the entity in the SharePoint entity picker, all the filter descriptors are listed in the Find dropdown box, the one you want isn’t selected as the default even though you’ve set the IsDefault attribute to true in a custom property of the filter descriptor and the filter descriptors aren't displayed in the order you desire. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 2 shows a snippet of a BDC application definition to demonstrate this behavior:

Possible Solution: When the IsDefault property is used more than once within the FilterDescriptors element, the filter descriptors are displayed in alphabetical order according to their default display name and the last filter descriptor in the list will be used as the default or selected item. Therefore, only use the IsDefault property on the filter you want selected as the default.

Finally, to remove filter descriptors from the dropdown list, change the type to “limit.” Note that if you are building a .NET Connectivity or custom assembly based BCS solution, then you define the meaning of the filter descriptors through your code. Therefore, even if you define a filter descriptor as a "limit" filter, this will not impact how you can use the filter in your code. Other filter descriptors will also work. The point is that limit filter descriptors do not appear in the entity picker drop-down. However, this filter will appear in External List views by default (see Figure 3).

Figure 4 shows a snippet of a BDC application definition to demonstrate this behavior.

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