Magento

Hi all.

New here - just installed Magento today and quite impressed so far.  I’m looking into using Magento live once it hits 1.0 but have two questions that’re critical to using it, and they’re regarding (I presume) dataflow:

1. Would I be able to import products, prices, stock levels and other attributes from an external accountancy package (for reference: Exchequer) to populate the product and category parts of the MySQL database each morning (for example)?  Not really fussed on the delivery method but I presume some kind of XML feed.

2. Would I then be able to export that day’s orders back to Exchequer at the end of the day, or even better, provide some kind of pushed feed from Magento as orders are verified that go directly into Exchequer?  This could be via an email with an XML attachment, for example.

The accountancy package isn’t particularly relevant, to be honest, but I just want to ensure that the process itself is feasible before heading too far down the Magento route.  I’m a PHP programmer so some level of in-line coding would be OK, but obviously the modular approach is better.

Thanks for any replies!

Redpen

Did you get a solution for this?

Did anybody find a solution for this?

Well depending on what data you need to import/export you can simply use the SOAP api. For speeds sake it might be better to do this without actually using the SOAP layer and accessing the api classes directly, but otherwise the functionality is all there. The only problem is that this approach sometimes uses up lots of memory, so depending on the number of products you might need to do the product update in batches.

Good luck

Claudia

Hi Claudia

Thanks for the quick reply. I have been plying with the soap api and it can do most things for me. The most important thing I need to do is when a customer posts a order (purchase). I need to be able to convert this to an xml (ebis-xml) file and it is then emailed to my accounting system.

Would this be difficult to and can you point me in the right direction on how to do this?

Unfortunately I don’t know.  Check whether you get the necessary order data via the SOAP api. If the SOAP api is not good enough it might be a idea to write an event handler for the order after save event (although there might more suitable events, check the list of events in the wiki article mentioned below). This event handler would fetch all the required data from the order and store in a separate table. Then you could go through this table every night and create the required xml files that you need.

You can find information about events here:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/customizing_magento_using_event-observer_method

Good luck

Claudia

We have just gone live with our Magento store and are about to migrate to Iris Exchequer. Has anyone explored an EDI link between Magento and Exchequer?

Rich

Has fizzled out??…

Hi guys any luck implementing the ebis-xml standard?

Does anyone know how to run dataflow in cron to import products automatically? 1.4.0

hello
well i have no idea of importing products manually...hope you get your answer soon

Has anyone else heard of the eBIS-XML standard?