Quickbooks integration (intranet) - php

Question

I need to integrate vTiger CRM with Quickbooks 2010. So it is PHP. QB server and Linux box running vTiger are sitting in the same office. I try to figure out if there is a way to make PHP talk directly to QB server without using web connector. We need real time data access. Not like real 'real time', but report needs to be generated in like 5-30 seconds. Only reading of data, no writing. Any way to send/receive qbXML directly to QB server?
Thanks in advance.
Michael

Answer 1

This can be done... but be aware that QuickBooks isn't always the most reliable piece of software to integrate with for real-time data access - connections to QuickBooks tend to be both slow and fragile, which is why you usually see a queued model with the Web Connector.
What you could do is write a custom C# component (look at the examples included with the SDK, specifically this one: C:\Program Files (x86)\Intuit\IDN\QBSDK12.0\samples\qbdt\c-sharp\qbXML\CustomerAdd) which opens a connection to QuickBooks, and then does whatever.
"Whatever" might be something like:
Run a query against QuickBooks, and then HTTP POST the data back to vTiger
or
Open a socket and listen for incoming requests, in which case PHP could connect to the socket and feed the component requests which it could relay to QuickBooks, and then return the response
Be aware that generating a report in QuickBooks every 5 seconds is probably going to slow QuickBooks down considerably. Depending on how much data you're talking and what filters, it might not even be possible to get QuickBooks to generate a report that quickly.
Likewise, be aware that certain things cause connections to QuickBooks to fail, so you'll have to handle those gracefully. Specifically:
QuickBooks automatic updates will lock out integrated apps
If you have too many users logged in at once you'll get locked out
If someone else goes into single-user mode you'll get locked out
etc.
Maybe if you can provide more detail about why you need such frequent access to reports, we can provide some additional information.
Your code would look something like this:
while (true)
{
string input = "your fancy qbXML request goes here";
RequestProcessor2 rp = null;
string ticket = null;
string response = null;
try
{
rp = new RequestProcessor2 ();
rp.OpenConnection("", "Your App Name");
ticket = rp.BeginSession("", QBFileMode.qbFileOpenDoNotCare );
response = rp.ProcessRequest(ticket, input);
}
catch( System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException ex )
{
MessageBox.Show( "COM Error Description = " + ex.Message, "COM error" );
return;
}
finally
{
if( ticket != null )
{
rp.EndSession(ticket);
}
if( rp != null )
{
rp.CloseConnection();
}
};
// Do something with the response here
...
}