Online store integration - advice please
Arrrgghhh - I don't have OPV installed yet, but my daughter-in-law (the practice manager) has her web people working on a online store to sell stuff, and I need to think about how to integrate this.
The concept is as follows:
- the web store is represented as practice location & stock location
- 'anonymous' web customer purchases are entered as OTC transactions
- web purchases by existing practice customers are entered as either Customer|Charges|Counter Sales or Customer|Charges|Invoices
Obviously I need to automate the integration as much as possible. [If the web sales reach any real volume then hand keying the transactions will be impossible.]
Kettle is one possibility. I know enough from my work on the RxWork conversion to figure that I can build the necessary transforms [provided I know the customer and product ids - and I don't see any problem in providing this information to the web store database so that when the day's web sales come in, they come complete with the necessary ids].
So - advice please - is Kettle the way to go, or is there an alternative?
Regards, Tim G
Re: Online store integration - advice please
You could use Kettle, but you'd be responsible for managing the customer balance updates.
My preference would be to have a service integrated into OpenVPMS that processes orders and handles invoicing and payments. This could be a simple scheduled job that picks up the order data from a table/filesystem, or a SOAP service called by the online store. As OpenVPMS doesn't yet have plugin support, you'd have to make some changes to OpenVPMS to integrate it.
Another approach would be to develop a standalone tool that uses the OpenVPMS jars to generate the invoices and payments.
-Tim
Re: Online store integration - advice please
Tim - thanks for this - my age is showing - I had to go and look up SOAP to see what it is. I will go and talk to the web development people and see what they want to do.
I suspect that the other component that may be necessary is a tool to run OPV reports so that one can extract the required data to be uploaded into the web store database (eg report all products in store location webstore, showing product name, id, unit price, stock qty, and output in CSV format to file xxx.csv). ie a mechanism to do batch processing of certain OPV operations (such as reports, period end, and statement generation).
One could of course do the data extraction that I need with an SQL query, but the 'runjob' approach is more generalised.
Leave it with me for the moment.
Regards, Tim G