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External Integrations
I am looking for some information on how to integrate dESCo to external sources. What I am hoping to do is automatically create jobs in dESCo from an external source via an API call or other method, and then synchronize the job information and status updates with that external source so I can eliminate duplicate data entry,
Has anyone done this?
Leo
617-735-9400
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I do not believe this is possible yet. I know they're working on a cloud platform which usually opens up the possibility for APIs.
Hey Leonid, glad to see you on the Community! Marlin is correct. There are some utilities out there, for reporting purposes, like Crystal Reporting or Hammer Man reporting, which is more of a company that is able to integrate with Microsoft SQL Databases. But beyond that, we do not have any external source integration or API's available.
Hi Leonid, I'm right there with you. I like to have all my systems aligned and talking to each other. Like Scott said the best that I have done so far with ESC is to do a lot of custom reporting with SSRS and Report Builder. I try to create out own internal systems to use this data and then craft it into custom reports and utilize personal databases for our Estimators and Techs to enter information into and pull from. I try to avoid a lot of data manipulation in the ESC database itself, although there have been some basic changes I make from time to time to data, but it is helpful. Not a lot of ideas on what you can do outside of kind of making your own application work based on the information the system has.
I would like to work a little more closely with ESC database to see about creating inserts and updates through a custom application but not sure all the constraints that ESC has on all the tables. There is a lot of relational data that I get nervous about updating as I am afraid I will break our production database....but hey, that is what a dev environment is all about! :)
Hoping the cloud version does open up API possibilities as that is pretty much industry standard for cloud applications at this point. Love working with ESC and look forward to future releases. Hit me up if you have any specifics you would like to have another brain on.
Luke, did you ever set up a test database? I could help you set one up next time you're around. Hit me up on chat if you want.
To give you a quick overview:
There's a procedure we talk about, called a server migration. If we take this process and do it on a test computer/environment but keep the live database online, we can rename the migrated data. You'd have a test environment that you could tinker around with and do whatever you want.
The only roadblock is you would not be able to have a "Test" environment for the mobiles, since that requires a second license.
But you'd still be able to have a fresh, no worries, test database to do whatever you want and not worry about your live database or live mobiles.
Let me know.
Yeah, I have a couple databases already set up :). I had talked to your team about setting up another Connections Server for testing purposes, and I believe they were good with that, but it ended up we didn't need to the second Mobile test environment at this point.
I typically do perform all my testing on dev before pushing to prod and have found it very useful and reassuring :) Thanks for the insight though Scott. Much appreciated.
Good good, just making sure. You're very welcome!
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