bridge with inventory control system

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13 years 7 months ago #13501

Hello

i want to ask if your component allow us to develop a bridge with an inventory control system.

Thank you

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13 years 7 months ago #13509

Yes, we are more than happy that someone wants to build a bridge :)

We have an api for plugins for hikashop:
www.hikashop.com/en/support/documentatio...r-documentation.html

Since no one had to do an inventory bridge, we might need to add additional events in hikashop. If so, let us know what you need and we will see what we can do on our end.

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13 years 6 months ago #16464

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the reply.
We have a website that needs to be implemented and use e-shop features. This company also is using an inventory stock control.

We had a meeting with the company that provides and supports this inventory system to discuss on how we can build a bridge between the two systems. They have raised the need to use COM Objects. Is this something we can do for Hicashop?
In addition please inform us what we should ask and request from their side in order to implement a two way bridge (so that information is updated from where a change occurs). We will also request from them a set of calls we can make on their system on each action.

Thanks again

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13 years 6 months ago #16491

COM objects are available in PHP using the COM extension: php.net/manual/en/book.com.php
This extension is available by default if your server is a windows server. It is not possible to use it on a linux server apparently.

So, if your server is on windows, then PHP can use COM objects and thus you can use them in HikaShop. If your server is not on windows, you won't be able to make a bridge to any PHP ecommerce solution.

Note that we added more APIs to HikaShop since a month ago and you should not have everything you need to update the stock on your inventory solution when something changes in HikaShop by implementing the APIs provided in HikaShop as a HikaShop plugin. What you should ask then is the complete implementation documentation for their side and maybe one or two examples of the use of their API with COM objects in PHP (that will help you implement it).

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13 years 6 months ago #16501

Hi,

As a first step we will try to establish on the website communication regarding products managements with the stock control system. This means that we will need to provide them APIs for product add, delete and edit.
Reviewing Hikashop API at " www.hikashop.com/en/support/documentatio...r-documentation.html " I can see that I can setup various actions upon different events happening on Hikashop side. What happens on the other way round though i.e. A new product is inserted in the stock control system. How does that stock control system fires or triggers something to insert the product in the website database as well.
Any examples should be very helpful as well

Thanks again for the help

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13 years 6 months ago #16503

There are several ways to do that. The easiest is to use the CSV auto import plugin included in HikaShop. You have your inventory control system automatically generate a CSV file of your inventory and upload it via FTP to your website. In the plugin, you specify the path to the file and voilà.

It could also be possible for you to build a joomla xmlrpc plugin for hikashop so that your inventory solution could then call the xmlrpc web service. That however means some more development on your end than the first solution.

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13 years 6 months ago #16558

Thanks for the solutions.
I was thinking the same to use the cron plugin and load csv file for products. The only problem is that the inventory system only will provide us a curtain format of file (still expecting the specifications :) and they cannot alter it to match the specification hikashop plugin requires.
So now we have two solutions
i. Change the import plugin for products to read the different file specification :)
How easy would that be
ii. Parse the file and reformat it to the format currently accepted by the cron plugin
How easy would that be

I guess we will now better when we have the file specs from the inventory system

Thanks

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13 years 6 months ago #16560

Yes. It's hard to say without the specs of their format.

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13 years 5 months ago #17429

Hi Nikolas,

Finally we have the format of the file.

Code;Name;Price;Category;Season;Collection;Featured;Sizes;Colors;Images;Stock;Discounts;Modified

Sizes and Colors are separated by this string “%”
The corresponding images go by “Color/ImageFile”
For example line 35 in the attachement has two color codes 099 and 408 .. their images go like this (099/IMG_4613.jpg%408/IMG_4611.jpg ).

In addition my other question is if we can identify from the "Code" if the product already exists and instead of inserting it we update it.

Let me know of modifications we would need to do and if you provide customization work

File Attachment:

File Name: item.csv
File Size:1,328 KB

Attachments:

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13 years 5 months ago #17432

Characteristics are handled differently in HikaShop CSVs so you won't be able to import them direclty with the current import.
Instead of having the characteristics on one line and then defining a way of separating them int he same column as they do, hikashop uses several lines like that:
product_code;product_parent_id;color;quantity
product_1;;blue;
variant_1;product_1;blue;12
variant_2;product_1;red;10
variant_3;product_1;green;20

That means that there will be a need for converting from their format to hikashop's if you want to import the CSV the the hikashop import feature.
We do custom works. If you would like a quote, please use our contact form in order to request it.

The import system of HikaShop use that principal. When a product already exists based on the product_code, it is updated, otherwise, it is inserted.

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