We’re currently scoping out our next major iteration on Epicor REST Services and I’m interested in finding out what you all are looking to see. Here’s a quick summary of what’s on deck - which of these are most important to you? Is there anything you’re wishing for that’s not on this list? Note: It’s unlikely that we’ll do all of this in one update and I’m excluding any info about rewriting or improving specific business object methods/services.
Simplified Authentication - Wrap all our current auth methods behind OAuth2 providers so that you only have to integrate to one thing ( standards based OAuth2 ) and can embed our login ui into your app easily.
API Keys - Get an api key that carries authorization to use portions of epicor services with a set of credentials. This is like a permanent login token that you generate for each application so you can skip logins for integrations that only have one user. For example a data integrations where you say feed new orders into epicor via rest and just need one user to call POST /SalesOrders/ over and over.
OData4 - today we support OData3, we would keep that and add OData4 as well as expand it to cover all services not just the odata queryable services.
OData expanded $metadata to include custom epicor metadata like captions, numeric formatting rules, like links, etc
Open API 3 - Any interest in us supporting the new Open API 3 specification? Today we support swagger aka open api 2.
Revamped interactive documentation - faster, cleaner, easier to find things.
Adding context info like company, workstation, plant, language, etc into the url so you don’t need to use headers to pass that information in.
Webhooks - subscribe to events in epicor via rest calls and have us call your rest service every time something you subscribe to happens in epicor. For example we call your rest service every time a shipment is completed or an order is entered, or…
Interested in your thoughts and priorities. What’s frustrating or too complicated in ERP REST today? Thanks in advance!
Sweeeet! These enhancements check all the boxes of what were pinch points for me.
Simplified Authentication - $20
API Keys - $0
OData4 - $10
OData expanded $metadata - $30
Open API 3 - $0
Interactive documentation - $0
Adding context info - $9
Webhooks - $30
Other - $1 <— That little guy… I wouldn’t worry about that little guy.
Simplified Authentication - $45
API Keys - $40
OData4 - $15
OData expanded $metadata - $0
Open API 3 - $0
Interactive documentation - $0
Adding context info - $0
Webhooks - $0
Other - $0
Also, not sure if this is in scope, but someone should start creating connectors for services like Stamplay, Zapier, Microsoft Flow, Dell Boomi, Jitterbit. (I’m just assuming behind the scenes they would call the REST Service)
Point taken. Backwards compatibility is on our list to preserve as much as possible.Vast majority of these features are designed to be additive (as in even adding them to /v1 wouldn’t cause existing integrations to break) but a few might impact so we’ll take care there not to just cut you off. My goal originally was to always allow for at least one /vX backwards compatible so you have time to migrate items to vNext.
Not part of this project but I can confirm at least that this is on our radar. Some of the other things on this list like api keys and standards based auth are in part about being able to more easily integrate with other services including these kinds of orchestration/integration/connector services.
