Hi, Erik and I were just chatting on IRC about web services. I recently updated our in-house management system to generate new invoices in LSMB, and it's a pain in the butt to do -- the current process looks like this:
1. Hit the Login page with username/pw, store session cookie 2. Post some minimal detail to is.pl - customer name/entity_credit_id, part numbers/qty, action=update 3. Parse the response, scrape all the form fields out and merge their values with the items we want to post -- and in 1.3 make sure to update form_id to get past the anti-csrf protection 4. Post the resulting data to is.pl with action=post ... and then if we want to also send an email, essentially repeat the last couple steps to send the email out to the billing address. It sounds like adding a good web service api would help this project for at least a few of us -- but probably help get far more wide-spread adoption. At Freelock, we do a substantial amount of web services work, both creating servers and consuming them as clients. I've come to really favor REST-based, resource-oriented APIs that use HTTP verbs to mean something. I'd like to propose building a REST interface that can interact with the data on the server. Is this something that Moose will get us without much work? If not, I'd be happy to contribute code to serve this purpose, if I can find somebody to sponsor the work. And I'll definitely provide feedback if anyone wants to take this on themselves. What I'd like to see is basically an API that has a specific URI for each resource. For example, an invoice #456 might be referenced at: http://myledgeraddress.com/store/invoice/456 A simple GET on that address would check for authorized access, and then retrieve the invoice in a form requested by the client. I generally set up services to accept a content-type header to specify xml, json, html, csv, etc -- and allow it to be overridden by a parameter in the query string. A PUT on that address with an updated object in the body would update the object, again based on authorization. (I'm thinking to add payment to an invoice). A DELETE on that address would delete (almost certainly dis-allowed on this type of object). POST is used to create new objects, or do particular data-changing actions on an object or in the system. GET would also accept a variety of parameters, providing a built-in search to get a collection of objects -- GET http://myledgeraddress.com/store/invoice/?eca_id=334&open=any GET http://myledgeraddress.com/store/customer/?start_date=2011-01-01&start_date_oper=gt For implementation, this should be pretty easy to provide some sort of request handler and load up the new objects that Chris has created, do the appropriate changes, and save. The old code is obviously much harder. Perhaps we can start with the new entities, customers and vendors that have already been done, and add more of the accounting objects as they get rewritten? Cheers, John Locke http://www.freelock.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The demand for IT networking professionals continues to grow, and the demand for specialized networking skills is growing even more rapidly. Take a complimentary Learning@Cisco Self-Assessment and learn about Cisco certifications, training, and career opportunities. http://p.sf.net/sfu/cisco-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list Ledger-smb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel