Quickbooks External

[xclntdesign]

Anyone have any luck using the Quickbooks SDK with Livecode?

I've tried registering the DLL as an external with mixed results. In my standalone settings, the QBXMLRP2 script library is available, which I guess is a good thing. But when I do

Code: Select all

put the externalPackages of stack "home"

it does not show up, which means I can't access it in the IDE.

I was going to use the COM EXE wrapper, but I couldn't get it to register on my machine, and everything else I've read says its a nightmare trying to get it to work right and not the best way to go for production. And if I can't get it to work, I can imagine the end users of my app won't be able to either.

Have any suggestions on what I can do to get this to work? Any code snippets that I can reference or plugins I can buy?

[shaosean]

You tried registering a QuickBooks DLL as an external? Externals need to be in a special format, so just linking to DLLs does not work (really wish they would add this like a few other languages have).. What you would need to do, is write an external that exposes the DLL interface to Rev..

[mwieder]

You can use the QuickBooks SDK, but not directly from LiveCode. I've done this for a commercial application, so I can't distribute the code, but in essence:

LiveCode can't talk directly to the QB DLL, so you have to write a separate executable to do that part. I ended up writing a command line program in C that sets up the proper calls to the DLL and retrieves the responses. I use LiveCode to do the text-to-xml-and back processing, then hand off the actual QB communications to the C program via the shell function. It works fine, but I sure wish the SDK were better documented. Especially the error codes.

LiveCode->
text file->
shell("binary" && parameters)->
response file->
xml processing in LC