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Switcher
SPyle
Posts: 977
Registered: 11-03-2008
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

[ Edited ]

James,

 

Search for "web service" on this site. 

 

I don't know much about it, other than it is NOT a function of EBM.  I think you can use third-party products to pull info from MAS and push it back in, perhaps with other merchant stores like MIVA.  I'm not a web guy, just a small business owner trying to make this work for me.

 

Also, send me a PM with your email address.  I have some documents I can send you.

Steve
Moderator
SRYork
Posts: 125
Registered: 11-06-2009

Re: EBM order confirmation

[ Edited ]

Wow! How much time do you have?  Just kidding...

 

To start, I should point out the difference between eBM and Web Services. 

 

eBM provides an "Out of the Box" solution to create web pages linked directly to your MAS 90 / MAS 200 AR, SO and IM module data sets. Based upon various options you can select you can define relationships in your products a multitude of ways and these relationships are independent from how they are set up internally. The products pages are dynamically loaded based upon these relationships defined.  The objective was to provide a relatively "quick" means of developing a web site within MAS 90 / MAS 200.

 

Web Services provides the means to communicate with your MAS 90 / MAS 200 installation.  Primarily, it provides a means to create sales orders from a web page that "you create".  In this scenario, there are no templates per se.  Nor is there a direct link to your data sets to dynamically load web pages. This opens up your web pages to be anything you wish, using any web authoring tools you wish, etc.

 

As you can see they are 2 totally different things, satisfying 2 totally different objectives. On your MAS 90 CD there is a Documents folder.  In that folder there is a document that provides a much better explanation of Web Services.  There is also a eBusiness Web Services Examples sub-folder that may help.

 

Now on to eBM tokens and customizing eBM templates ...

 

In Help there is quite a bit of information on this.  Under e-Business Manager select the Working with ..., then check out the help included for "Templates" and then "Web Pages". This will give you a pretty good overview.

 

When discussing tokens specifically, let me first just say that these are simply place holders in the HTML template.  You can easily identify them as they will always start and end with ~~.  There are 2 basic types of tokens, data tokens and processing tokens.

 

The simplest is a data token.  When the HTML template is rendered, the web engine will replace these tokens with the actual data.  Data tokens are always  ~~TableName.ColumnName~~ or ~~TableName.ColumnName$~~ .  Note the $ is added when the column is not a number.

 

Processing tokens identify specific ProvideX code to run.  When the HTML template is rendered, this code is executed when encountered by the Web Engine as it parses through the template.  It is used to dynamically insert HTML markup.  The main example is when adding the product rows on the products and services pages or the items added to a users shopping cart.  The format for these tokens are ~~ ProgramName;Label ~~.  When this token is going to be part of a link that will load a new page, you will see the ISAPI redirect (.pvx?) included ~~ ProgramName.PVX?;Label ~~. This is the special code used by the plug-in to know when to process a eBM Template.

 

Finally, there are some special handling identifiers that can be included on a token. The 3 you will see most often are ?a, ?x and ?t

 

?a tells the web engine to render the code exactly and to not escape any HTML markup.  This is needed when the token value being inserted will include HTML markup.  If you do not include this identifier the < html markup is translated to &gt;

 

?x indicates the token is a formula.  The web engine will solve the formula and substitute its results when rendering the page.

 

?t indicates a dynamically loaded table.  This is a "special" processing token. It identifies the location of the logic to run necessary to dynamically fill a table.  What makes it special is the row just beneath it is used to load the table row.  So when you see <tr><td>~~ ProgramName;Label?t~~</td></tr>, the table row just after it <tr><td>~~TableName.FirstColumnValue$</td><td>~~TableName.SecondColumnValue$</td></tr> is what will actually be used to fill the table.

 

The Customize Your Web Site.doc attachment is an overview I did when the eBM frame work implementation was first done.  It goes into a bit more detail than my description above.

 

The Customize Sample.doc was created to provide a "How To" guide to help explain adding UDF's to the eBM HTML templates for both header and detail table scenarios. It was done at the same time as the Customize Your Web Site.doc and includes the HTML markup edits with explanations. 

 

There is a zip file (that I was unable to attach) that includes the HTML templates used to do the screen shots in the doc and a Customizer import to set up the UDF's used. Since this was originally done for Customer Support, you (or your reseller) should be able to get a copy from them if you would like to have a copy of it for a starting point to play around and try the sample out for yourself. 

 

Hope this helps.

 

GatorGal
Regular Contributor
jatses
Posts: 52
Registered: 12-13-2010
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

GatorGal,

 

Thank you for the extremely helpful information. I foresee several hours of reading... :smileysad: ( I hate reading documentation ) ...and yes, I do have a significant amount of time. :smileywink:

 

I really like the flexibility of Web Services (PHP to be precise), but can you truly design/develop an online store using it? I want the same functionality as eBM ( searching products, quantity, pricing, etc. ) without all the syntax limitations ( having to be parsed by ProvideX ). I see where the Web Services can create sales orders, but I don't see how it can obtain any data about possible products from MAS. Is that what you are referencing when you say:

 

Nor is there a direct link to your data sets to dynamically load web pages.

 

Thank you again for all the assistance,

 

 

James

James
MAS 200 [4.40.0.5]
Moderator
SRYork
Posts: 125
Registered: 11-06-2009
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

[ Edited ]

Correct, from my 'limited' understanding of Web Services. 

 

Whereas eBM provides a means to linking and query your products at the time of the page request, I believe Web Services would require a different paradigm. I am not the expert on how you would want to accomplish this. 

 

Maybe have an XML export of your items to use to create your products pages then do a web services connection when the page is loaded to query a specific element of the item (quantity is on hand and available comes to mind). With this approach, I would envision having static pages I could edit and include key words, etc. so that they can be found by search engines.

 

To mirror the eBM approach of dynamically loading the pages I would think possibly use ODBC to retrieve and load the pages. Your imagination on how to access the data is the only limitation.

 

I think you really only need the web services when you want to 'write' something into the data base, like a sales order.

GatorGal
Regular Contributor
jatses
Posts: 52
Registered: 12-13-2010
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

GatorGal,

 

Excellent! Thank you very much. One last question, do you know where I can get any info on the ODBC parameters/configuration for MAS?

 

Thanks again,

 

 

James

James
MAS 200 [4.40.0.5]
Super Contributor
DFeller
Posts: 2,943
Registered: 10-28-2008
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

I have customers using Magento and using eBusiness Web Services.

 

Dawn

Moderator
SRYork
Posts: 125
Registered: 11-06-2009
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

Sorry, I don't think I can be much help on that score.  The only thing I can think of is you would need to setup an ODBC Data Source connection to your MAS Data files (like used for printing Crystal Reports).  I believe the ODBC driver used by Crystal is read only so I don't know why you couldn't just use the one created for use by reporting.

 

Then of course, if you want access to it from your web pages, you would need some means of getting to it through your firewall from your web site and how you would "technically" accomplish it on your web pages is up to you (or your web designer).

GatorGal
Visitor
MFNDX
Posts: 2
Registered: 09-29-2010
0

Re: EBM order confirmation

All,

 

Thanks for the responses to my original. We resolved the issue with some changes in the configuration settings.

 

Also, if anyone is looking for modifications to EBM I strongly suggest using the company below, they have a great solution.

 

 

Emre Karaca

xkzero

 

847.292.4466 office