I am not thinking about e-commerce magento or similar front ends
I wondering if people have found the need to create their own web UIs rather than use Epicor’s own.
For a number of years now, our production cells have been equipped with large screen android tablets for displaying assembly instructions and the question arises as whether they can be further used to connect to Epicor.
I dont really want users having separate applications on the tablet just one web interface giving access all the information they need. I like the idea at the moment of a user signing into a job and also through the same interface having hyperlinks to documentation, videos and IM chat.
I’ve made a several custom web interfaces (html5/Javascript/Python) to some automated systems at my organization using the REST API. So far only simple transactions (reading Job, Part, Class, Warehouse inventory, read/writing to user defined tables, etc…) but I also hope to implement signing in and out of a job from the web ui.I have been pointed towards Epicor Functions for that purpose but have yet to implement it.
I have a software background so pretty much coded these web interfaces from scratch using React. I had some requirements like real time communication over websockets that I needed to handle, but if your application is a closer to a CRUD application maybe there’s something out there that will play with the REST api? I am not aware of a no-code tool that would fulfill my requirements although I would certainty check it out if there was one.
P.S. We also include documentation and other resources like editable tables in these applications as you suggested in your original post. I like it because I can run the application as a full-screen kiosk at start up on a Linux based SBC like a Raspberry Pi and operators only has to get comfortable with the application instead of an unfamiliar linux desktop.
Though I have various bits of programming over the decades I wouldnt consider myself a programmer.
I have looked at various low code / no code platforms. Most are cloud-based, which doesnt make a greate deal of sense as all our IT infrastructure is on-site. Also the licensing costs for a small site like ourselves look quite steep. I know it potentially saves a lot on developer costs, but still a tricky one to get budget for.
We run most reporting from a custom web server hosted on-site. MS Report Builder was too primitive for our needs, clunky and hard to customize and update already created reports. Now we can write our own custom queries and display their results with our own custom webpages.
We have now have complete control what data we pull out of Epicor. we have production area TVs that display all kinds of metrics from Epicor presented in a variety of formats.
I’ve known other people to do similar things. I’ve seen examples with an Apache /PHP webserver and also examples with IIS / ASP. If you’re not a programmer then it would be very hard to do. You need knowledge of
web server technology (IIS/Apache)
SQL and Epicor table structures
Web scripting languages that can talk easily to SQL databases like ASP/PHP/others