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[Steve Endow]

Hi developers and system integrators,

During two GPUG Summit developer sessions, attendees had some questions about which integration method / API they should use with Dynamics GP for various integration scenarios.

During the sessions, David and Mariano explained some of the pros and cons of the GP interfaces and I mentioned some situations where a custom .NET API might be beneficial.

If anyone has questions about the pros or cons of each of the technologies or when each might be useful, feel free and post a question here.

I’m tagging Mariano and David to loop them in.

??

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Steve Endow, Microsoft MVP
Precipio Services
Los Angeles, CA
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[Ed Wax]

I’m currently using the “hidden” eConnect WCF service for my .NET REST APIs (seems to work just fine).   I’m not familiar with GP Web Services so I’d be interested in finding out more about them.  Can you provide any pointers/references?

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Ed Wax
Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy
Boulder CO
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[Steve Endow]

Hi ,

I’m intrigued by your idea of calling the eConnect WCF service directly. I’d be interested in learning more about that and your use case.  Are you serializing the XML yourself / on another system and then submitting it to the eConnect service?

As for GP Web Services, I personally don’t recommend using it for most of my customers.  It does work, but tends to be a hassle to get installed and configured properly, has a fair amount of overhead, and it is SOAP based.  I’ve found it to be very difficult / nearly impossible to use with some non-Microsoft platforms, such as external SaaS providers who typically use a Linux based platform.  It’s also not a terribly friendly API to work with, IMO.

I’ve been providing my customers with a custom ASP.NET Core web API using http / JSON / REST and a Swagger interface. It’s extremely fast and reliable, simple to deploy, and easy to update and maintain.  The only currently downside is the development time, but I’m working on building a standard project that I can re-use with customers to decrease the cost.

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Steve Endow, Microsoft MVP
Precipio Services
Los Angeles, CA
steveendow (at) gmail (dot) com
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[Ed Wax]

Steve,

I worked with WCF for a number of years (previous tour stops)  so quite familiar with the technology, especially svcutil.  I’ve discovered that eConnect is installed as a Windows Service which, in turn, hosts a WCF service with a couple of endpoints:

I have a simple class that includes this service reference and therefore I have the endpoints listed above available to me, primarily CreateEntity.  I accept a Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.eConnect.Serialization.eConnectType object (which holds any/all eConnect data types).  The object is serialized and sent to the eConnect WCF service, creating a client channel as needed.   All of my REST API calls for eConnect go thru this class.  By encapsulating and abstracting away the WCF details, this just looks like any other method call.

The secret sauce is in your app/web config where you specify the connection string for the desired PHARM database.  In my case I have a production database and a test database we use for unit testing using the exact same code base.

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Ed Wax
Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy
Boulder CO
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[Angela Morehouse]

Apologies upfront for replying to an old post, but hoping someone can help. Is there a tool, Web Service, econnect, third party option, anything that you can use to load a document to the doc attach in GP from an outside source?  Simple example. We’d like to load the W-9 to the vendor card from a workflow that is built in our document management system.  Is there a way to get the document, not just the vendor card data into GP?  Thanks in advance.

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Angela Morehouse
CC Industries
Chicago IL
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[David Musgrave]

I don’t know if there is a tool that exists already, but I can offer you a solution.

GP Power Tools offers the ability to create custom Service Based Architecture (SBA) web services. You just need to get the standard Dynamics GP SBA functionality working, Install GP Power Tools and then you can call the custom webservices.? Once that is working we need to create a GP Power Tools script that drives the GP user interface or calls the appropriate back end code to perform the actions you desire.

We could go the custom development route, but using GP Power Tools, just needs a custom script which can interpret the data passed in (Vendor ID, UNC Network Path to document to attach, etc.).

Let me know if you want to discuss further.

Regards

David

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David Musgrave MVP, GPUG All-Star

Managing Director
Winthrop Development Consultants

Perth, Western Australia

http://www.winthropdc.com
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