Navision Commerce Gateway WITHOUT BIZTALK?

harm.poelen

Hi There,

I am looking at a solution for a client that wants to setup automatic document exchange between them and a few customers. One of the customers has a third party that is pushed forward as a preferred partner for integration. They provide tools to pick-up sales orders from the client and transport the order to my client and also translate the information to a format that can be read by my client (somewhat like BizTalk). The file is then posted on a file system location on the network of my client and can be processed from there. The sales invoice needs to go the opposite direction. We only need to post it on a specific location on the network and the application from the third party will pick the file up and push it to the client. Since there are issues regarding sales prices, checking of codes used in the sales orders, sales order verification, etc... I don't want to reinvent the wheel... and I was thinking about using Commerce Gateway. The most important question to which I can not find an answer is; "Can commerce gateway function without BizTalk Server and export / import (XML) files to and from a specific network location?".

kriki

[Topic moved from Navision Attain forum to Navision e-Commerce forum]

DenSter

Commerce Gateway uses external automation components built by Navision (MS) to communicate with Biztalk. CG depends on Biztalk, so no you can't run CG without Biztalk, not without some pretty heavy programming.

The objects are all there, the XMLPorts, the code to insert the records, etcetera. You can use all of them and modify them as you need them. All it takes is for you to figure out how it works and make the necessary changes.

If I were you though, I would probably develop something from scratch that uses similar logic. It's not too hard to program something that checks a network folder for new XML documents and that imports the values, and creating an XML document is not that hard to program either.

harm.poelen

Thanks for the reply. I had already thought about that (building it from scratch). The more I started to think about the problems to tackle in the B2B communication between partners, the more I began to realize that there a some tough issues to solve before you have a good import scheme for orders. Building the export of sales invoices is not that hard... I agree... but since the client wants to start XML communication for a number of clients, I had a preference to look towards the standard Navision CG solution that is already in place and would hopefully solve all the issues that can arise when you start B2B communication for orders and such.

DenSter

You can use the CG logic as a model though. Like I wrote this piece that monitors a message queue for incoming sales orders as XML documents. It saves them in a staging table and attempts to process them into the sales order. For failed orders, users can then open the inbound tables and try manually, making modifications along the way.

This is loosely based on the same kind of process as CG, just not with Biztalk, not as robust as a full blown B2B solution