[ic] Datamining with Interchange

[Phillip A. Ryals]

Unfortunately, our system is horribly proprietary.  It's called DDMS, if you
might have heard of it.  It's made specifically for the office-products
industry.  What stinks is that it is the best available for what we need.
The problem is their e-com software.  They want to charge insane amounts and
scrimp on features, all while hosting it across the country.  nice. :)

They do sell a package that provides a basic API to the system.  They refuse
to work with you if you need help though, so I'm a bit nervous about
starting this thing.  I basically requires that you write an entire gateway
to interface a 3rd party system to theirs.  Hopefully, it isn't as bad as it
sounds.  But I sincerely believe I can help the independent dealers if I go
through with it and make InterChange work with DDMS easily.  It'll just be a
huge project.

Regular importing, btw, isn't an option because the customer needs to have
delivery same or next day.  We need the order in the system and waiting as
soon as it is placed so that it can be processed for fulfillment.  We
actually connect to our wholesalers seven times a day to upload orders and
have them delivered to our warehouse.

So long story short, this has to be as transparent as possible to the rest
of the system.  Everyone is used to the orders just appearing, so it's my
job to make sure that happens.  yay! :)

-phillip



----Original Message----

Phillip,

I'd be interested to hear about your experiences if you do take this task
on, sounds like some custom work but would work well when finished.  To
answer your question the way to do this would probably be to call a usertag
in Reciept.html (which is displayed to the user when they complete an order)
that would pull the information from the database (instead of trying to
parse the email) and call an API supported by your accounting program to
insert the data into the system.  Is the accounting system proprietary?
Does it have an API for inserting data into the invoice, customer and item
area?  The way this has been accomplished with Quickbooks is to dump an IIF
file once a day which is data pulled out of the Interchange database and
formatted for QBooks to handle.  If your system supports a type of file
format import it would just mean making your own Accounting usertags to
write that file out, definitely do-able.  Good luck!

-Ron