We are working on upgrading to Kinetic 2022 (onprem) from Epicor 9.
One of the items is the Electronic Interface for ACH to our bank.
Currently in E9 we are getting the standard CSV file from Epicor and then running that through a PowerShell to only include the columns the bank import needs.
For the upgrade we want to remove PowerShell from the process by using the included Payment ACH US Domestic C# scripts to create a new Electronic Interface just for our bank for the 6 fields they need.
However our developer is struggling with getting references set properly in Visual Studio 2022 Community edition. When we open the Package we cannot find any way to update the references. We have found screenshots on here indicating where to change the references, but we cannot find that option in Visual Studio 2022.
When I did the work at PRCP, in the cloud no less, I never was able to get any references to work. I would have to submit the file to the Cloud Team, they’d install it, and then fix the syntax errors.
This is one place where I REALLY wanted to upload to GitHub, have it install and check, instead of all of that manual intervention.
Interesting, I just did this for both ACH (US) and EFT (Canada) and in neither case did I need any references or a VS project. I probably did it a bit hacky but it was all done in VS Code without touching the csproj or creating a SLN
The Canada one was the worst because there wasn’t a template in Epicor, so it was mostly writing queries on this.Db
But in both cases I just created a payment method to call the selected EI, and then modified the EI to query the CheckHed table related to the batch info. Most of the issues I ran into were typecasting and identifying which field came from where under what conditions.
For the Canadian one I couldn’t get the wretched thing to output with the “Generic 80-byte” template so in the end I just implemented StreamWriter to dump everything in a text file in a secured network share.
Now the process is roughly: take the payment group > Actions > Process Payments > Print Preview and it spits out a text file the AP clerks can upload to the banks and emails the RA to the supplier’s AR contact.
Oh, we also had to make sure suppliers had AR contacts, and then put a filter in the report style to select that contact’s email.
Seems to work.
Thanks for the replies, our developer is the Summer Intern and he is not familiar with Epicor, but he seems to have very good practices, and wants to make sure he understands the code he is interacting with.
I would prefer that he have access to all the references so he can better understand things, but if anyone knows of a way to get Visual Studio to work properly or the correct way to reference Epicor reference and system references, or even if another tool (like VS Code) is better suited, let me know.
I think what makes Electronic Interfaces difficult is that they are not standard compiled DLLs that are linked in at compile time, which is what Visual Studio and VS Code do well. EI programs are more akin to Customizations, BPMs, Functions, and Dashboards where Epicor compiles them on the fly. They, too, don’t have an out-of-the-box way to use VS or VS Code. @josecgomez wrote one for Customizations by instantiating enough of the client to get the references but for the server-side stuff, this is more difficult. It may be possible but we’re definitely not living in external DLL-land anymore.