Hi Ibrahim,
MaJic did this very thing with the Galileo system - the other most widely used global reservation system !
We looked long and hard in the early days of using some sort of screen scrape technique to get the data back and parsed and into FM but soon gave up on this.
Galileo is capable of providing a text based handoff of the contents of the booking file (called a 'Machine Interface Record') and so we captured that file which is delivered back to site via a port on the GDS network box which we collected and then parsed fairly easily.
I would be surprised if Sabre did not have a similar mechanism and you may want to follow that one up.
These days, Galileo has provided a product which is called XMLAPI and as the name suggests is an access point via a web service to send XML direct through to the core database and then have returned an XML stream via the same web service which contains the response data that can then be drawn into FM.
Again, you may want to explore this avenue with Sabre.
Final suggestion for now is that reservation systems have come a long way since the old dumb terminal days and now run via on site servers which control the sessions.
These servers are capable of much greater functionality than just session control and data packet routing and so may also be capable of storage and retrieval of booking files local to the LAN and therefore more accessible by your FM solution !
This would be another option to check.
Hope this gives you some ideas and feel free to contact me off list with any further things that I may be able to help with.
On 19 Apr 2005, at 20:52, Ibrahim Bittar wrote:
Hi all
I've been developing a solution for a travel agency for a while and now the customer wants some integration between FM7 and Sabre, which is one of the most widely used booking system around the world.
As you may know, Sabre works in a text based interface where the user execute commands and the system give answers according with those commands. Well, I'd like to know if there is a way to capture the screen output in order to parse that information and create an invoice directly in FileMaker.
Basically what I want to do is to generate an invoice every time the user sells an airplane ticket. I've heard of an application called iCab that does this precisely but I have no idea of how iCab "listens" to Sabre.
If anyone have experience with this kind of application please lend me a hand. I'll appreciate a lot!!!.
Thanks in advance.
Saludos
Ibrahim Bittar Associate Member, FileMaker Solutions Alliance http://www.eikonsys.com
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Regards Harry Catharell **FileMaker Certified Developer** MaJic Solutions Limited - FileMaker Partner t: +44(0)1908 236678 w: http:://www.majic.co.uk ++ FileMaker EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNERS - DevCon 2004 ++
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