Is this a thing that’s coming (or exists) with E-10? I’m looking at productivity platforms right now and bring in some basic status information from E-10 may be an interesting idea in the future. (and I always dream big)
Safe Harbor, forward looking, yada yada
Webhooks in general are an interesting and valuable approach. I have hacked something similar into a coded BPM with off the shelf E10 to play with the idea. SignalR is already used in several areas in E10 (e.g. Social) and gives another interesting architectural tool.
Take a look at what is happening in Mobile CRM and Active Home Page and you can assume we are looking at options. Not breaking the heck out of existing customers is of course a priority but adding value for more interesting integrations ana capabilities is always being reviewed.
Sometimes they fail for a variety of reasons, sometimes they make it into the product and evolve. Vantage 6 to dotnet front end in V8/E9 to dotnet server v10 anyone?
Keeps the ideas coming, I’ll comment as I can reasonably do so 
2 Likes
Does the rest help functions not work in firefox? When I click on this button in firefox, nothing happens. If I do in chrome I get the help info to pop up. Or do you think it’s something to do with my personal settings?
1 Like
it looks like a bug in Get help button submitBaqForm function.
1 Like
Is this still on going?
1 Like
We ended the preview discussion board near the beginning of this year since we’re now in our second GA release of rest services and the preview was mostly for gathering feedback before we went officially GA. So that project is ended, but we may bring something similar back later this year as we’re looking at doing a vNext set of rest capabilities and are interested in your feedback.
Regardless you can always send me bconner at epicor dot com any feedback you have about the rest services.
3 Likes
No as far as I know. But you don’t have to use it for everything. What’s the use case?
-Jose
1 Like
Apologies, I hit delete a bit hastily. I’m hoping to expose only a select few services over REST to limit the business impact, and sort of ‘pilot’ the new REST interface (over the WCF foundation). With that, I don’t want to go exposing all the business objects, just a few (for example, only Customer and Territory). I’m assuming the “Enable RESTful services” checkbox is an overarching enable, and the only way to limit access is via a custom gateway that directs calls down to Epicor?
2 Likes
As far as I know you can only enable all or nothing, but there is no business impact to doing so. The REST interface is merely a facade to the existing WCF Services. There is no downside to exposing them all
5 Likes
Ahh awesome, thank you for clarifying that Jose. I thought as such, and this was actually going to be my next question but you’ve read my mind in regards to it being a facade for the WCF.
1 Like
Jose is correct on implementation. The Method Security is probably the way to go. That is done at the BO level so will cover you no matter which way someone accesses the BO. If we locked down just the REST endpoints, you are just making the minimum code to do damage two lines of code instead of an HTTP URL.
If you need to lock down a service, I’d tackle it there.
If you REALLY think you JUST need to lock down REST but leave a security hole a semi can drive through in WCF, you could look at a firewall solution with content filtering. I have not played in that area of IT Hardware in awhile so I’d defer to someone with more current domain expertise and available approaches / devices.
3 Likes
Has anyone been able to figure out how to get odata to return the list of all BAQ’s? Not in the browser, but to an application like Excel so you can choose.
If you connect to a SQL data source in Excel, you can pick the table(s) you want.
It seems with odata and epicor, you have to explicitly know the syntax of the one baq you want to retrieve.
3 Likes
If you take that address from the swagger page, and use that to in the from web section in excel, it will walk you through loading a file that will list all of the BAQ’s. It looks like you can refresh that list too. It’s not Odata, it’s XML, but if I could figure it out, it must not be too hard. Not knowing your end goal, I don’t know if this does what you want or not, but it’s possible to get a list in excel.
2 Likes
Thanks. I probably worded that poorly. I’m not looking for the list of BAQ’s to show up in the excel grid. Rather the Import data screen, when connected to an ODBC or SQL data source will show you the list of ‘tables’ in your database, and then you can select one or more to pull into either excel or the query manager.
But with rest, it seems, you can only directly retrieve the one BAQ and you have to know the URL in advance.
1 Like
Correct, the scenario you are describing is more of a data mining type scenario. You may want to look at the EDD product to see what I mean. That gives you the flexibility you mention but with a level of security in mind.
Excel or any product going directly to the db is not encouraged. Not banned, but you should go in with eyes wide open since you are bypassing all security and calculated columns when going directly to sql. That’s why the design of the feature is to package up your query in BAQ and then consume it in Excel or other clients.
3 Likes
My ultimate problem is that I’m using a Data Warehouse automation product (TimeXtender) that lets you pull in SQL tables and it builds the data warehouse and the SSAS Cubes.
However, if I want to build this to work with Epicor SaaS that allows no direct access to SQL but does allow Odata access, I need to use a 3rd party Odata ODBC driver. However, like other ODBC sources, it connects to the ‘source’ and then you specify the ‘table’.
I guess I’ll have to work with the ODBC driver folks to figure out how to make this work.
1 Like
If tools are only dealing with SQL today, those tool companies are going to have a very smaller customer base in the near future.
OData or Graph QL are becoming bare minimum features
2 Likes
@Bart_Elia Epicor needs to join the Open Data Initiative https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/open-data-initiative and map their data to the Common Data Model GitHub - microsoft/CDM: The Common Data Model (CDM) is a standard and extensible collection of schemas (entities, attributes, relationships) that represents business concepts and activities with well-defined semantics, to facilitate data interoperability. Examples of entities include: Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, Product, etc.
@mchinsky check out the new PowerBI release. They added the ability to ETL from a REST API to a hosted SSAS instance. They are also adding XMLA endpoints to the PoweBI models so you can query the data from any app that supports it (Excel, SSMS, PowerBI, EDD if they add it). https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2018/08/power-bi-dataflows/
4 Likes