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A couple years ago I built a very robust and intricate virtual inventory system for integrating with third-party vendors. I created two accessible endpoints: on
by inanutshellus 11y ago
A couple years ago I built a very robust and intricate virtual inventory system for integrating with third-party vendors. I created two accessible endpoints: one highly customizeable webservice endpoint (I'll literally take any valid XML and work with you to transform it into what I need), and one luddite-friendly SFTP server supporting extraordinarily simple export-from-excel XML output.
I was raked over the coals for providing the SFTP/Excel solution, "FTP?! What is this, the '80s?" was the quote that sticks with me.
Almost all of our vendors turned out to be small shops. Only two of our dozens of vendors use the webservice, even as easy-like-Sunday-morning as it is. Everyone else uses the Excel solution.
It's hard to let yourself write the uncool solution that actually fits the bill.
- RyJones 11y agoOne of our data providers at MSN gave us this binary blob, which we had a decoder to run over and produce a text file, which we then transformed in something regular, did a diff, and updated the table we needed to update via SQL. We begged and begged for XML support. Many releases on, they trumpeted XML support! Huzzah! The XML had a header and one huge CDATA block of the Base64 encoded blob they usually sent. Thanks!
- kyllo 11y agoI work a Fortune 500 company in an industry where FTP and EDI are the norm, and SOAP/XML is considered fancy. Half the time our customers (many of whom are other F500 companies) think that all that stuff is too hard or expensive, and prefer to just e-mail us an Excel spreadsheet every day. Enough so that we recently introduced a new service offering where a customer can e-mail their spreadsheet of data to one of our employees, who will upload it to our system for them once a week. This is just how IT works in most businesses.