Dynamics GP Partner Chicago, San Diego News: Integration Manager

Jun 2
08:20

2009

Andrew Karasev

Andrew Karasev

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

Great Plains integrations, especially in Edi and ecommerce scenarios are very popular and in our opinion they are not overly too complex to design and implement. If you are MS Visual Studio C#, VB .Net programmer with some SQL and XML skills, you should be able to program real time or batch mode integrations in eConnect SDK for Dynamics GP, and as such your integration could be called directly as part of your ecommerce web site instruments.

mediaimage

However if you do not carry programmer in your IT department,Dynamics GP Partner Chicago, San Diego News: Integration Manager  Articles but have some SQL expertise, you do not even have to touch eConnect, as most of the job could be done in Great Plains Integration Manager directly, and you could schedule integration as macro, and the rest of work for EDI or ecommerce integration could be done in SQL Views.  Read this small publication as orientation session in GP IM:

 

1.       Simple integration scenarios.  If you have text CSV or tab delimited file as integration source, then all you need to do is to establish simple text file source and if your target has header and lines, where you have only single file, you need to look at grouping feature.  For example, if you plan to import GL transactions – one per each day of Retail operations, natural grouping would be transaction date.  Two sources will be based on one text file, where header will be grouped by date and transactions will be as they are and you link header and lines by Date field

 

2.       Advanced ODBC over text file.  Imaging that you have CSV or Excel file, which has several columns, staying for SOP Invoice Item lines each column.  In our opinion, this one is pretty challenging in creating Advanced ODBC Source and then creating unions over the same text file, pulling specific column in first select, then unionize it with the second column in the second select and so on.  This natural technology of building unions is unfortunately complicated by bugs in ODBC Text driver, where you cannot save Select statement field format in INI file.  The work around – have driver guess on field format every integration once again

 

3.       Advanced ODBC over SQL View.  This is the most advanced scenario, when you can expose transactions from ODBC compliant DB: MS SQL Server, Oracle, Linux PHP MySQL, Microsoft Access, Lotus Notes (with repetitive records).   Our favorite technique is this – create linked server in MS SQL Server 2005 Management Studio or SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager and then create heterogeneous, meaning cross-platform SQL View and base Advanced ODBC Source on that view.  Here you can practice with EDI (precisely formatted SQL Select statement).  To make your integration more powerful, consider creation SQL DTS package, where you expose specific day transactions set and mark them as exposed and when integration is accomplished with success flag, mark those transactions as integrated

 

4.       VBA scripting in IM integration.  Here you have additional alteration options in even driven scripts: Before Integration, Before Document Commit, etc.  Good example would be something like this – imagine you are in Collection business and you have to issue checks to your customers with 30 days payment delay.  In Before Document commit script you can increase check date accordingly