SAP B1 is friendly to Microsoft Visual Studio programmers through its so-called Software Development Kit. In the upcoming version 9.0, scheduled for Q4 2012, it is renamed ‘Business One Studio’. Let’s do a short technical introduction and then try to talk about case studies and get answers to popular questions. Let’s start with the SDK categorization:
1. UI API. ‘The UI API provides programmatic access to windows, menus, and events in SAP Business One. The UI API allows you to create new windows, modify existing windows, add new business logic, add or modify application menus, and more. ‘ After the introduction of ‘Help Center’, we would like to mention that the UI modification may be vulnerable to future projects such as updates. We prefer to recommend you to focus on the type of project integration and see the next paragraph
2. DI API. ‘The DI API provides a programmatic interface to SAP Business One through a set of fully functional business objects. The DI API provides access to the business logic and data access layers of SAP Business One.’ It’s much easier to review the integration code and recompile it with the new version DLL set
3. DISERVER. ‘The DI server is an extension of the DI API and supports all of its objects. It is designed for high-volume data integration, where numerous client connections need to be managed simultaneously and optimized for speed. It is also suitable where the web services architecture is preferred.’ Here you should think about maximum performance
4. Code samples are available in C# and VB. This is one of the reasons why you should consider coding in these languages. However, if you are comfortable translating into your favorite Net-compatible language, feel free to implement it.
5. Structure table. Here you need to combine the client interface and the SDK. Login to B1 and under menu View->System Information check it. Open the form where you need to know the table and hover over and read the field and table name in the lower left corner. Enter the name of the table and search for it in the Help Center. Try the following exercise. Open the sales order form and hover over the Customer field. And you should see the Name CardCode field and the ORDR table. Then review this table in Help Center Search. If you’re comfortable finding the table on your own directly in Kit, go to Customization Tools -> Database Table Reference
6. Integrations. It is recommended that you first create user-defined tables in the client application and then use them as staging objects. You can import records into such a table directly through the SQL insert statement, since it does not participate in the core business logic. The next step is programming the DI API in Visual Studio, where it reads staging table records and creates AR invoices, purchase orders, etc.
7. Integration with Linux and PHP. This is a frequent request due to the fact that custom eCommerce portal is often hosted on MySQL on Linux platform. A good recommendation is to consider the SOAP XML web service with SDK libraries. The web service is computing platform neutral and can be called from Linux