REST and ETL

We currently use Service Connect run time licence and a solution developed for us by Epicor Consultants to ETL to/from Epicor 10 and 365 Dynamics CRM.

We are looking at reviewing the interface and making changes to it. We are also looking for B2B Supplier data sharing as well. Also looking to future proof to be able to develop / implement sharing easily.

Looking at REST services we are able to ETL from Epicor very easily.

REST will Patch or Post back into Epicor one record at a time.
What tools are used to use this functionality?
What are the solutions or what are people using to ETL data back into Epicor?

Do we need our own Service Connect licence, (what if any plans do Epicor have for this product)

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Glenn

Any tool that can consume REST will work. I have used TALEND, Office 365 FLOW, Dell Boomi, etc.

1 Like

Looks like Jitterbit =)

If you can afford it https://www.mulesoft.com/ ā€“ very expensive! But very elegant.

Am looking at 365 Flow as a simple test bed for REST but am unable to connect to our Test server. We have set up a Gateway on the server but are unable to Connect to the Server. I try and do a simple Flow

. I am getting error message ā€œThe provided host name ā€˜srvtest02.domain.localā€™ could not be resolved.ā€ Our setup is incorrect somehow.If I use Postman data comes back OK.

Just missing a step somewhere?

Any ideas?

Not sure if you should be using anything external without fully understanding DNS and how Web Servers talk to each other :slight_smile:

I would assume that srvtest02.domain.local is not known to anyone but your local networkā€¦ DNS 101 you are going to need to specify your external domain/ip, something that you could access outside of the network via your mobile phone on 3G Connection via a browser for example.

You would need to setup an external domain, make sure that 443 the SSL Port can be accessed from the outside by adding an exception in your firewall, among other things.

If you were Office 365 located in England and you did ping srvtest02.domain.local it would yieldā€¦ nothing. Hence the

The provided host name ā€˜srvtest02.domain.localā€™ could not be resolved.

The reason it works via POSTMAN isā€¦ because its running on your PC connected to the network with awareness of the srvtest02.domain.local


Impeccable timing by @Bart_Elia his recent post Multiple Applications and DNS Tricks - Experts' Corner - Epicor User Help Forum might show you some examples.

2 Likes

The DNS trick write up I use a lot these days ways not meant as a discussion of DNA in total. There are probably a lot of decent write ups out there on DNS 101. Thatā€™s one of the points of the designs in E10. We did try to use as many ā€˜vanillaā€™ approaches that are out there - on purpose.
#NoThrowAwayKnowledge is a goal.
If you have other systems where you understand these architectural approaches, you can leverage them against E10. Also, if you need to learn something (DNS in this case) you can leverage it on most other MSFT style applications from other vendors or home grown.

Because you are using the on-premise gateway it does not rely on any public DNS and is more like a VPN tunnel that will pass the same URL you use in Postman locally. In the flow admin did you create a custom connector using this gateway? I am trying to find 10 minutes today and I will publish a quick example.

Here is a quick guide on how to configure the Microsoft Flow gateway, the custom connector for Epicor REST, and test an action against it.FLOW_Setup-OnPrem-Connector.pdf (485.0 KB)

4 Likes

Hi Bart, I saw you talk at Insights and didnā€™t have a chance to introduce myself, which I kicking myself for. I know you had a good chat with our Temperzone friends here in NZ.

I did the Extended Education - Rest Services on Sunday Afternoon. I had done the course and set up of rest previously so have played with rest quite a bit. I am not a developer/coder just an advanced user of Epicor.

We have had the help of @danbedwards Dan Edwards with our setup of our Test Box which has been great. We wish to use 365 Flow to access and consume rest. The Test Server set up is effectively using MS Flow Gateway on the Test Server using a self signed server certificate.

Our Techies do not wish to replicate this on the Live Production Database (without getting a recommended way to proceed from Epicor as this is our APP server). They are asking what the recommended set up for this would be from an Epicor perspective. We currently have a Gateway to our SQL server which is used for Power BI.

The question. Are we able to use the current Gateway to our SQL server to access REST services on the Appserver and is this Best practice

OR

Do we create a new Gateway on our Appserver.

Cheers

Glenn

Glenn - Not sure Epicor will have a best practice, but if you read the Microsoft Flow connector documents for PowerBI, etc. you will see a strong recommendation to keep it as close as possible. The quote below came right from the Microsoft folks and typically is best to follow. Is your concern more around security or the performance impact of the connections? There are are options such as making REST available externally and have that hosted off a integration type app server with a legit certificate and all the other security requirements.

The closer the gateway is to the server, the faster the connection will be. If you can get the gateway on the same server as the data source, that is best to avoid network latency between the gateway and the server."