Re: Ledger-smb-devel Digest, Vol 58, Issue 21

[..hidden.. (Hugh Esco)]

John:

Yes, that would be me, please.  

Two some years ago I did some preliminary work on:
http://search.cpan.org/~hesco/LedgerSMB-API-0.04a/lib/LedgerSMB/API.pm

And have experience writing RESTful interfaces using Application::REST, 
I think it is.  

Please include me in further discussions on this question.

Thanks,
Hugh Esco 
678-921-8186 x21
..hidden..

From: ..hidden..
Subject: Ledger-smb-devel Digest, Vol 58, Issue 21
To: ..hidden..
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:38:20 +0000


Today's Topics:

   8. Proposal: Web Services API (John Locke)


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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:38:11 -0700
From: John Locke <..hidden..>
Subject: [Ledger-smb-devel] Proposal: Web Services API
To: Development discussion for LedgerSMB
	<..hidden..>
Message-ID: <..hidden..>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi,

Erik and I were just chatting on IRC about web services. I recently
updated our in-house management system to generate new invoices in LSMB,
and it's a pain in the butt to do -- the current process looks like this:

1. Hit the Login page with username/pw, store session cookie
2. Post some minimal detail to is.pl - customer name/entity_credit_id,
part numbers/qty, action=update
3. Parse the response, scrape all the form fields out and merge their
values with the items we want to post -- and in 1.3 make sure to update
form_id to get past the anti-csrf protection
4. Post the resulting data to is.pl with action=post

... and then if we want to also send an email, essentially repeat the
last couple steps to send the email out to the billing address.

It sounds like adding a good web service api would help this project for
at least a few of us -- but probably help get far more wide-spread
adoption.

At Freelock, we do a substantial amount of web services work, both
creating servers and consuming them as clients. I've come to really
favor REST-based, resource-oriented APIs that use HTTP verbs to mean
something. I'd like to propose building a REST interface that can
interact with the data on the server.

Is this something that Moose will get us without much work?

If not, I'd be happy to contribute code to serve this purpose, if I can
find somebody to sponsor the work. And I'll definitely provide feedback
if anyone wants to take this on themselves.


What I'd like to see is basically an API that has a specific URI for
each resource. For example, an invoice #456 might be referenced at:

http://myledgeraddress.com/store/invoice/456

A simple GET on that address would check for authorized access, and then
retrieve the invoice in a form requested by the client. I generally set
up services to accept a content-type header to specify xml, json, html,
csv, etc -- and allow it to be overridden by a parameter in the query
string.

A PUT on that address with an updated object in the body would update
the object, again based on authorization. (I'm thinking to add payment
to an invoice).

A DELETE on that address would delete (almost certainly dis-allowed on
this type of object).

POST is used to create new objects, or do particular data-changing
actions on an object or in the system.

GET would also accept a variety of parameters, providing a built-in
search to get a collection of objects --

GET http://myledgeraddress.com/store/invoice/?eca_id=334&open=any
GET
http://myledgeraddress.com/store/customer/?start_date=2011-01-01&start_date_oper=gt


For implementation, this should be pretty easy to provide some sort of
request handler and load up the new objects that Chris has created, do
the appropriate changes, and save. The old code is obviously much harder.

Perhaps we can start with the new entities, customers and vendors that
have already been done, and add more of the accounting objects as they
get rewritten?

Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com

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End of Ledger-smb-devel Digest, Vol 58, Issue 21
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