Epicor Updates

Epicor ERP 10
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Now that Epicor is pushing out updates on a bi-weekly basis and supplying less individual fixes, I am curious how people are managing their external applications that hook to Epicor. We have quite a lot of external programs that connect directly to Epicor using dll references. The problem with this is the need to recompile before updating the server.

I thought about converting all references to service references (WCF) to keep maintenance during upgrades at a minimum?

Anyone doing something different?

Thanks,

Ted

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You are already in 10.1.500X update everything to use the REST API. This will (hopefully) mean that you don’t have to update your applications anylonger except in the instances that the methods change significantly.

We just finished writing quite a few tools using the REST API and are more than pleased

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Thanks Jose, the REST API is OK to be used in production even though it is still considered in Preview?

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I have been working with it for quite a few months and have been talking to Epicor Development about it. I can say with 99.98% confidence that you are fine to use the REST API in 500.X.
There are a few bugs here and there but it is a solid implementation and it is being released for full production support in 600 (which just went live on SaaS)

@jgiese.wci from WCI and I have worked on many projects using REST for his implementation and he is going live on Friday on production with REST. He can go into more details about what we implemented over there if you’d like.

Obviously you’ll want to thoroughly test your app and make sure it works as you expect but I suspect it will be just fine.
We tried to get a REST presentation from the customer standpoint at insights but we couldn’t get it approved on time, however they will be doing an Extended Ed class on it at insights as well as a regular session.

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I will enable the preview and do some testing. Also, I did sign up for the REST course at Insights, should be interesting.

Thanks for the knowledge as always Jose!

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I believe @Bart_Elia will be teaching that Extended Ed on that, I’ll be in the class too and I believe @jgiese.wci will be there also so hit us up and we can chat about it some more then too if you’d like.

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I have used the REST API to replace Web Service and DLLs alike. There was only one time i hit a roadblock with a service that didn’t work so i just used a different BO that achieved the same thing. Very solid for “Preview”. I have replaced a CRM plugin for Outlook, a label printing program that allows for customer specified labels and remote site printing, web dashboards for visual management around the plant, an automated PO acknowledgement system (vendor clicks a link and it marks it acknowledged in Epicor), and @josecgomez and I have spend the last week finalizing an Excel plugin that uses BAQs to pull in data for pivoting. The API is really very solid, very versatile and the best part is cross platform. All of the above is spread across PHP, Node.JS, and C#.Net

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Thanks for the insight @jgiese.wci starting to poke around with the REST API now.

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Never had an issue with programs when pushing out individual fixes even if the software used the binaries to do the work. The new web services seem to be happy with minor patch updates IE 10.1.500.x as the method signatures shouldn’t change else its a “Update Service Reference” in Visual studio and redeploy.

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Thanks for the kind talking points Jose and Joshua. I will have an Extended Ed and 1 hour lab on REST and will have plenty of booth time so swing by and I can chat about approaches.
We do have ‘interface change’ reporting we rolled out internally in 10.1 to try to eliminate the accidental change of an API or data structure that blows up an integration. I have not heard of too many issues since rolling this out so hopefully it is helping all of you as it was intended.
WCF has its quirks though and REST will be a larger focus as we go forward. We won’t be dropping WCF so don’t panic - it solves some more advanced scenarios. For simple point to point however REST is very easy as indicated above. We have a couple of new products to announce at Insights that are based on REST and a new project I am leading that is also REST based so you can assume it’s pretty solid.
To be honest, the biggest scare we had and why we stamped the ‘Tech Preview’ on REST was the use of OData syntax for querying. I was waiting for an army of RESTafarians to come at us with pitchforks but I think we positioned things well enough to make most happy.

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Valid concern! I was in a ReST newsgroup and they could be such @$$es that people left the group in droves. The originating document on ReST was written by Roy Fielding (one of the authors of HTTP) for his Ph.D. dissertation. It outlines an architectural style and no technology specifics. If one doesn’t conform to ALL of the style then people use the term RESTful to keep the RESTafarians and their ‘bitchforks’ at a safe distance.

Mark W.

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