SharePoint 4 Developers

Hi folks,

These last days I faced an error in SharePoint 2010 while I was creating BDC Model projects. At the moment of deploying my solution I got this error message in the Beta version:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Add Solution': Property 'SiteUrl' contains an invalid URL. Import failed with the following exception message: The site <site> could not be found in the Web application SPWebApplication Name=<webapplication>.
Parameter name: properties

In the RTM version the error message changed a little bit, which is still not very clear:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Add Solution': The default web application could not be determined. Set the SiteUrl property in feature <feature> to the URL of the desired site and retry activation.
Parameter name: properties

In order to solve this issue, I searched at the Internet for similar issues and I found out an excellent article of Jan Tielens that explains a workaround for that.

Just because I don’t simply like to add links to other sites with specific solutions, due to broken links, I am going to let this available here in my blog.

Getting the error message

1 – Create a new solution with a project of type Business Data Connectivity Model according Figure 1:

Figure 1 – BDCModel Project

2 – Try to deploy by Visual Studio, the error message above will show up (depending on the version).

Correcting the problem

1 – Open the Feature XML file (Figure 1) and notice there is just only one property:

Figure 2 – Original XML File

2 – Add the following element to the XML, according Figure 2:

Figure 3 – Updated XML File

Note: Change the SiteUrl value to your seu web site url.

3 – Deploy successfully!

References:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2010/05/07/sharepoint-2010-bdc-model-deployment-issue.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2010/04/08/deploying-an-external-content-type-error.aspx

Cheers,

Marcel Medina

Click here to read the same content in Portuguese.