Many of us working with MOSS or WSS v3 must have been battling with this new cool product called Sharepoint Designer. And to be frank its really cool when you get to play with it well. On my Dev WSS site i wanted to get some sample data from Sql server 2005 and host it on my WSS site. So i first started by firing up sharepoint designer > Datasource Library and of course clicked on database connections It actually allows you to just type in your DATABASE name you want to connect to and then username and password and behind the scenes it creates a connection string for you and bingo you might get in or not. Anyway let me get onto reality when connecting to sql server 2005 database i didn't have any sucees using Windows Authentication. so i recommend creating a username and password in your database and use it to connect which most of the times works. The second problem i encountered after connecting to sql server 2005 was that when i clicked on SHOW DATA on my select datasource it returns an error saying "the server returned a non specific error when trying to get data bla bla " After pulling my hairs i don't have out and couldn't find a solution i decided to connect to sql server 2000 instance and all went well to my suprise and could see some data. After some searching i found Karine's Blog which saved the day. It seems there is some bad communication going between SPD and sql server 2005. And the workaround is to use a custom query preferably store procs which doesn't work sometime because i think SPD does some caching Read the blog for more info. Happy sharepointing
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