I’m looking for some suggestions/experience from people about approaches to take to import sales order data from external sources. Specifically, I have several clients who need to exchange EDI documents with Trading Partners, therefore I need processes that can be run by users on a regularly basis. What I had hoped to do would be to populate a couple of tables, i.e. the sales order header and detail, and then use a routine similar to the post button to create the various transactions. Any comments would be appreciated.
Look at standard BizTalk Integration. There You import to separate tables. You should build something like that From there You build a function to create Sales Order Header and lines. The nice thing about that approach is that You can have severeal sources of data to populate Your import tables and just one routine to create the orders. You also get a history of Your imported data. When a order is created You mark the imported header with the order number so You get at trail audit.
Take a look at Commerce Gateway. You can use this to do EDI. You should also be able to find an EDI add-on, for instance the one at http://www.lanhamassoc.com/edi.htm comes highly recommended.
Commerce Gateway/Biztalk is a very expensive solution, especially for small size companies. Another EDI add-on is from Watermark Innovation: information@watermark-innovation.com Low priced, simple en functional.
Skippy, What version and database are you running? How often do you want to import data? How much data do you want to import? When do want to import the data? We run (NAS) Navision Application Server to copy data into temporary / buffer order tables that is then processed as invoices or orders as appropriate. We are running 3.70 on SQL. This soultion works very well for us.
Let me put some flesh on the bones of my original post. The solution centre for which I work are currently in the process of selling MBS Navision Attain 3.7 to some current and some new clients, some of who will be using the SQL Server version of Nav., and some the proprietry database. Due to the nature of client’s businesses, most process bulk sales orders on a daily basis, some EDI, some proprietry format. What I therefore need to develop are codeunits to get data into the Attain database. My intention, and what I have done with other databases in the past, is create interface tables which I populate from any source external order files, then have a single codeunit to create entries in the application order header and detail files based on the data in the interface tables, and post the data. I was intending to use a similar technique with Navision, but just wanted some input as to what techniques other people used. Perhaps in hindsight, I should have included this information and been less vague in my original posting!! Thanks for the suggestions so far.