I have now played with the QBO and QBD APIs and feel I have a fair understanding of how it thinks and how to interact with it. So now it is time to design the actual integration solution.
Inside my application you can create new customers, quote services, perform services, and soon, pass invoices to QuickBooks, sounds easy.
But what if the customer is not in QB yet? No problem - for each invoice I will look up the customer (need the id anyway) and if it doesn’t exist, add it. But if I have to look up the customer for each invoice it seems like it might be slow. I will likely have 30,000 customers and have 500-3000 invoices per day.
So my question is this; what are others doing?
a) Are you storing the QB id for each customer in your data?
b) How do you detect address changes (changed in your app and changed in QB)?
c) Is the batch submission interface so much faster I should use that?
Thanks for your help!
We often times do store the QB id in our database for use. If we post an invoice into QB, we'll then store the QB id for future use if we need to modify it.
As far as detecting changes on the customer record and other info, there's a couple ways to handle the conflict resolution. One is to keep a timestamp on your side as to when changes are made. You can then compare this with the timestamp of the last change on the QB record and then make your decision as to which one gets updated.
FreddyMac,
To detect changes on the Intuit side you can construct a query with a CDCasOf Filter, which will return only the data that has changed since a date you provide. (ChangeDataCapture as of)
https://ipp.developer.intuit.com/0010_Intuit_Partner_Platform/0050_Data_Services/0500_QuickBooks_Windows/0100_Calling_Data_Services/0015_Retrieving_Objects
You need to keep track of data changes on your side.
The batch submission is not faster, its just easier for you to write the code.
The IPP SDK can queue the API calls for your and aggregate the responses.
regards,
Jarred
Related
I'm working on a D2L add-on right now and trying to retrieve all the courses the current user is enrolled in. The only way I found so far is using the
GET /d2l/api/lp/(version)/enrollments/myenrollments/ call. This works perfectly for a small amount of courses and is extremely slow for more than approximately 50 courses. Is there any better way to retrieve all the enrollments?
Thanks in advance
For end-users, this call is indeed the one intended to address this need. Since a portion of the performance drop may come from having to process a series of data pages (requiring several calls), you can try several techniques to add a bit of performance here:
You can pre-filter the call based on org unit type: this likely requires you as the app developer to know the org unit type IDs for the org units of interest to your end users. For example, if your main use case here is "student wants to see all the course offerings she's enrolled in", then you can provide the appropriate org unit type ID for course offering org units to your API call. This becomes more difficult if your app must address several different back-end services, or you don't know the org unit type ID used by the back-end service for the relevant org unit types.
You can try using an HTTP library that can pool connections, and batch together the calls that fetch all the data pages you need to get the complete list of enrollments needed. This will provide you with some benefit to overhead on each call, but the performance benefit will likely only be marginal.
Currently, this API route does not allow the caller to request a particular data page size, and allowing that would improve the overall latency involved in this use case: for example, requesting a page size of 500 records could conceivably fetch back all the enrollments in a single call. I would judge page-size requesting to be a completely reasonable feature enhancement to request, and I would encourage you to request it on D2L's Product Idea Exchange; in fact, I'd be rather surprised if someone hasn't already done so.
I am looking for solution of logging data changes for public API.
There is a need to tell client app which tables form db has changed and need to be synchronised since the app synchronised last time and also need to be for specific brand and country.
Current Solution:
Version table with class_names of models which is touched from every model on create, delete, touch and save action.
When we are touching version for specific model we also look at the reflected associations and touch them too.
Version model is scoped to brand and country
REST API is responding to a request that includes last_sync_at:timestamp, brand and country
Rails look at Version with given attributes and return class_names of models which were changed since lans_sync_at timestamp.
This solution works but the problem is performance and is also hard to maintenance.
UPDATE 1:
Maybe the simple question is.
What is the best practice how to find out and tell frontend apps when and what needs to be synchronized. In terms of whole concept.
Conditions:
Front end apps needs to download only their own content changes not whole dataset.
Does not invoked synchronization when application from different country or brand needs to be synchronized.
Thank you.
I think that the best solution would be to use redis (or some other key-value store) and save your information there. Writing to redis is much faster than any sql db. You can write some service class that would save the data like:
RegisterTableUpdate.set(table_name, country_id, brand_id, timestamp)
Such call would save given timestamp under key that could look like i.e. table-update-1-1-users, where first number is country id, second number is brand id, followed by table name (or you could use country and brand names if needed). If you would like to find out which tables have changed you would just need to find redis keys with query "table-update-1-1-*", iterate through them and check which are newer than timestamp sent through api.
It is worth to rmember that redis is not as reliable as sql databases. Its reliability depends on configuration so you might want to read redis guidelines and decide if you would like to go for it.
You can take advantage of the fact that ActiveModel automatically logs every time it updates a table row (the 'Updated at' column)
When checking what needs to be updated, select the objects you are interested in and compare their 'Updated at' with the timestamp from the client app
The advantage of this approach is that you don't need to keep an additional table that lists all the updates on models, which should speed things up for the API users and be easier to maintain.
The disadvantage is that you cannot see the changes in data over time, you only know that a change occurred and you can access the latest version. If you need to track changes in data over time efficiently, than I'm afraid you'll have to rework things from the top.
(read last part - this is what you are interested in)
I would recommend that you use the decorator design pattern for changing the client queries. So the client sends a query of what he wants and the server decides what to give him based on the client's last update.
so:
the client sends a query that includes the time it last synched
the server sees the query and takes into account the client's nature (device-country)
the server decorates (changes accordingly) the query to request from the DB only the relevant data, and if that is not possible:
after the data are returned from the database manager they are trimmed to be relevant to where they are going
returns to the client all the new stuff that the client cares about.
I assume that you have a time entered field on your DB entries.
In that case the "decoration" of the query (abstractly) would be just to add something like a "WHERE" clause in your query and state you want data entered after the last update.
Finally, if you want that to be done for many devices/locales/whatever implement a decorator for the query and the result of the query and serve them to your clients as they should be served. (Keep in mind that in contrast with a subclassing approach you will only have to implement one decorator for each device/locale/whatever - not for all combinations!
Hope this helped!
I am developing something with ejabberd server. I came to the need of changing the subscription logic. I am using ejabberd-2.1.11
My need is on how the subscription works, I would like to change the logic so that users upload their roster contact with subscription both automatically and and save in in the rosterusers table-colum subscription immediately to be B. So that they should be able to see online and in their contacts at least when the first one has already registered to the server. ( hope this make sense for you and is valid)
I am a very beginner in erlang and ejabberd architecture but I have already developed some basic modules, my question to you is if you could help me on this regard, how difficult is to make this change and if you could give me some hints where the changes would be
I'd stay away from modifying the server, it conforms to standards and follows the specification. So if you ever need to move to another server or upgrade, you know it's just going to work.
What you would do to achieve this is implement this behavior on the client using the server's features.
If you are really sure you want to modify the server, mod_roster.erl is the file you want to be looking at.
If using an external DB, you can also modify the DB directly, but changes won't be reflected until the clients log back in.
I have a strage requirement from a client, he needs to display a ramdom selection (100 - 200 items from mixed categories) of products for sale on & shipped by Amazon but ordered by price. The idea is to allow people find gift ideas based a user input price point.
I have been looking through the API docs but cannot see an obvious way to find search by price, I am thinking of writing a script to "copy" large parts of the amazon product catalogue into a local database & have it update every few weeks, then use this for user searches, but this does not feel right / their must be a better way.
Has anyone any experience with this type of problem? Thanks!
You would want to use the Amazon Product Advertising API. Using this API you would want to perform a SearchIndex-ItemSearch query. Possible parameters to ItemSearch are available on the API Docs here
You can see in the docs that you cannot query by MinimumPrice and MaximumPrice on SearchIndex: All. However, if you search specific indexes, it allows you to do a price related search.
I would guess that you can agree with your client which categories should the items be from. Then you can just query them one by one.
Amazon's database changes very often. Hence, caching data for a week without updating may not be desirable.
I'm going to attempt to create an open project which compares the most common MP3 download providers.
This will require a user to enter a track/album/artist name i.e. Deadmau5 this will then pull the relevant prices from the API's.
I have a few questions that some of you may have encountered before:
Should I have one server side page that requests all the data and it is all loaded simultaneously. If so, how would you deal with timeouts or any other problems that may arise. Or should the page load, then each price get pulled in one by one (ajax). What are your experiences when running a comparison check?
The main feature will to compare prices, but how can I be sure that the products are the same. I was thinking running time, track numbers but I would still have to set one source as my primary.
I'm making this a wiki, please add and edit any issues that you can think of.
Thanks for your help. Look out for a future blog!
I would check amazon first. they will give you a SKU (the barcode on the back of the album, I think amazon calls it an EAN) If the other providers use this, you can make sure they are looking at the right item.
I would cache all results into a database, and expire them after a reasonable time. This way when you get 100 requests for Britney Spears, you don't have to hammer the other sites and slow down your application.
You should also make sure you are multithreading whatever requests you are doing server side. Curl for instance allows you to pull multiple urls, and assigns a user defined callback. I'd have the callback send a some data so you can update your page with as the results come back. GETTUNES => curl callback returns some data for each url while connection is open that you parse it on the client side.