Passing the ID field to a Local App

iimusic

Hello,
I'm a relatively new EPESI user and find the product is absolutely excellent and so useful, brilliant job guys.

I have a small problem however and wonder if someone can help with this.

I have an application created using MS-Access 2007 which records sales transaction by allocating each transaction against a customer number( an ID ).
I allow the user to create new customers and to find them in a basic way.
I want use EPESI to create customers because it's searching ability is so much better then my local app.

My question therefore is this!

Is there an easy way to pass the EPESI Contact ID back to a local Ms-Access VBA Coded routine, so I can then use it and assign it to the local system, so that it can read back the data from EPESI. Effectively I want to link EPESI with the local application interactively somehow!

Currently I can access the EPESI MYSQL Tables easily using ODBC and this works fine, so I can read records BUT I need the Contact ID to go direct to the specific record.
Also I can open EPESI from with the MS-Access application and drive the Login Screen and get to the Home screen but I'm not sure how to address the other parts of EPESI to find the actual contact ID on the screen ( or I guess within the HTML! )

Big ask, but any suggestions are welcome.

ajb

I'm not sure about what you want to achieve, but you could use Premium/Sync to retrieve data by contact ID. If you'd like to pass any data from EPESI to the 3rd party application then you should use PHP to do that. PHP (EPESI) -> some api -> your app.
Some api may be a file, socket, DB, or anything else that's compatible with PHP.

If you'd like to open certain contact if you know it's id, then it may be a tricky part, because we don't have 'deep linking' and you can't link to certain place in the system. There are some exception.

Regards,
Adam

iimusic

HI Adam,

Thanks for your reply and help.

I guess really I'm looking to just pass back the ID of the current contact, either just newly entered or being viewed right now to the VBA Code which is with MS-Access.

Once the VBA code has that ID it can complete the rest of it's functions. Currently as the Contact reside locally within an MS-Access DB it of course works fine. Effectively I'm replacing the local Contacts DB with EPESI Contacts , as EPESI is so much better, but it's more difficult to link to it, I guess.

I'm no expert with regard to Web based programming, but I understand that it's not possible to access the local machine easily from within web pages, is that correct?

ajb

You can access it with JS, java or flash. In fact I need more background to fully understand your issue.
Where is EPESI installation? Your computer, your hosting, our hosting?
You've got your MS-Access app. Where it runs? Local machine? (I have no idea about MS solutions) Can it be ran on the same computer as EPESI. How you can access your APP? Is there any API?
And final question. How it should look like from the user perspective.
Something like this:
"I'm on my laptop. When I open EPESI in my browser from http://example.com/ I'd like to find a contact, and open respective contact in my local desktop app on my laptop. Copy all data if it doesn't exist."

Regards,
Adam

iimusic

Thanks Adam,

EPESI is installed and running on our own Dedicated Web Server on the Web, so we have total control over the server, it's not shared or otherwise, all ours.
The MS-Access 2007 app runs locally on several different computers. They are attached to a local file server where their data resides and it is retrieved by the local application. In MS-Access terms this is a Front End( Programs/Queries etc ) and a BackEnd( Data only )!

So what I'd like to achieve is that when the local application user wants to add a new contact, they will use EPESI and I'd like to find an automated way to give the Local Application back the Contact ID which EPESI allocated for that contact. OR if the user has searched EPESI for a particular contact then I'd like to pass that Contact ID back to EPESI.

I guess if I could alter EPESI to write the Current Contact ID to a local machine table I could make my application "poll" the table until it gets that ID and then I'm able to use it with the local application and that's all I need to do!

EPESI is such a great application, I'd really love to be able to use it fully, we've been testing for a while and it's clearly going to be exactly what we are after.

Sorry I should add that by using ODBC I can access the EPESI Tables on our Web Server without any problem, using code in the local application.

ajb

If you can access DB, then we could pass the ID by database. But also we could pass this id by creating a simple txt file that will be served by http server to anyone - I don't think it's security issue, as it's only meaningless ID.

You should choose when to expose that ID. On contact view or at will with button. We can create a new button in the Action Bar for the contact - ID will be exported to DB/file on click. Then your app will pull this ID.
Last important thing is to solve user conflicts. I suppose you've got more than one active user. Every user could operate on his own EPESI and your app front ends, so I think that we should export contact ID per user. Is it possible to set user login in your app? Is frontend configurable per user?

EPESI module adds button. Button action will create file data/<some dir>/<recordset>/<user login> (e.g. data/some_dir/contact/admin - we could export most of the records in that way). Your app will pull this file with http://epesi.example.com/data/contact/admin.

To create this module you will need to know:
1. How to create module
2. Recordset Addons - especially addon_label static method, that will allow you to create button in action bar.
3. Create file with ID in certain directory.

iimusic

[quote="ajb":kbayfywy]If you can access DB, then we could pass the ID by database. But also we could pass this id by creating a simple txt file that will be served by http server to anyone - I don't think it's security issue, as it's only meaningless ID.

Thanks this is very helpful.

1) I can easily access the MYSQL DB via ODBC from my application and each User has a separate Login for the Application and Database/Epesi so I can identify who they are. So I could easily have my application poll the file waiting for an entry to arrive. While it's polling, the user is busy using EPSI to create/find a contact.
2) I'd like the user to use EPESI to either create a new contact or find an existing contact, having done that, if they pressed a button to log it, that would work fine. If it was possible for that same button to minimise the EPESI browser window as well that would be good.
3) My application can then read back the relevant contact using the ID it's located in the table and display the Name etc as confirmation.

Thanks all sounds great, just need to work out how to make Epesi do it's bit!

For what it's worth, some simple method like this to enable a link to EPESI would probably be very useful for lots of people who have local MS-Access/VB apps or similar but who would like to use EPESI because the searching and other facilities in Epesi are really so good. I've got basic searching already in my local app, but it's no where near as good or flexible as the EPESI stuff, plus my local applications are not web enabled, hence the interest in EPESI. Lots of other people will be in a similar position, so I guess a simple interface like that would be very useful as standard in EPESI. Thanks again

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