In reference to a previous question of mine:
qbfc CustomerQuery based on email address?
Is it possible to create a custom detail report of customers, and using a custom field to "filter" the report. I must admit, I am not really clued in on CustomDetailReports, as I have no need for implementing them, and never had.
It does however look like its supposed to do just what it says, a custom report feeding you info form quickbooks?
What I am attempting to do, is get a list of customers in a detailed report, and filtering that report based on a custom field value. This way I can narrow down my possibilities of customers I need to check for, and get their ListID's or FullNames.
Currently I am returning all the customers using a customerquery, and iterating through them one by one to get the guy I am looking for. This is becoming a slow process as the customers increase.
I can store my own reference in an external DB, and use that to reference an email address to a customer ListID, but I would really like to achieve this with the data stored in Quickbooks only, as per the Quickbooks philosophy of, "Store Data Once"
Before I spend resources on trying to implement a custom report, can something like the above be achieved with Custom Detail Reports?
Thanks in advance.
Is it possible to create a custom detail report of customers, and using a custom field to "filter" the report.
Nope. QuickBooks does not support this.
It does however look like its supposed to do just what it says, a custom report feeding you info form quickbooks?
It will display a custom report, yes... but it won't allow you to filter it by custom fields.
Currently I am returning all the customers using a customerquery, and iterating through them one by one to get the guy I am looking for. This is becoming a slow process as the customers increase.
Have you considered instead caching the customers in your app? That would be much faster. Then you can just periodically run a query against QuickBooks to get customers that have been updated since the last time you ran the query (e.g. incremental sync of data).
I can store my own reference in an external DB, and use that to reference an email address to a customer ListID, but I would really like to achieve this with the data stored in Quickbooks only, as per the Quickbooks philosophy of, "Store Data Once"
My personal experience has been that, unfortunately, the query syntax that QuickBooks allows/uses is too restrictive for that to be realistic.
Related
I would like to send automated emails to a group of users present in my DB. The emails would contain data with dynamic content. Mostly a table with different set of items. I was looking to use mailchimp templates for that, but it doesn't seem to allow for the kind of dynamic content I am looking for. Essentially for each user, my code would come up with a json array of items to populate the table with.
I am at a loss as to where to get started there. Any interesting tools to do this kind of work, that can be called programmatically from python?
I am building a personal work/career portfolio web app project, and plan on using MongoDB for my database. (I plan to build the project using MERN stack.) Most of my data is not one-time data (such as education, and work experiences), however I have a few pieces of data (such as my personal summary (the content for my "About Me" section), and skills summary) that are one-time only data (I think "single instance" might be a better fitting term). I would like to store all of the data in a database, and set up an admin-end to manage and edit the data. However, I am not sure how to go about storing the one-time data in my MongoDB database.
One idea I had was to create a collection solely for the one-time data, and only allow the user (me) to update and read the documents in the collection. Another idea I had was placing all of my portfolio data into a single collection called "entries", and giving each "entry" a type (such as "Education", or "Personal Summary"). Then when I retrieve the data from the collection I would gather all the documents with the same value in their type field together. I was thinking of storing each of the types as a constant on my server. However, my biggest concern with both ideas is if they would be considered bad practice of not.
I would be very appreciative if anyone has any advice on how to solve this problem.
I had implemented this a while back on one of my small projects, and again after discussing it over with some professionals I'm in contact with, they said that the best approach would be to create a collection with a single document that contains all the information, like the links, about, etc...
One more thing I, was suggested is that we could use Redis solely for the purpose of storing this type of information as well.
Something that I implemented a long time back similar to the one collection, single doc approach: https://github.com/codelancedevs/Sundar-Clinic/tree/local-backend/src/api/app
Working on a similar approach here: https://github.com/kunalkeshan/Cam-O-Genics-Backend
Hope this is of some help, I'm still learning as to what might be the best approach. Open to any suggestions out there!
Basically, I'm querying the D365 web API and I'm trying to get all of the related contacts for an account.
Been following this link:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/developer/webapi/query-data-web-api#retrieve-related-entities-by-expanding-navigation-properties
Trying to use $expand but it only will bring over _primarycontactid_value. So just the one primary contact and not everyone that is related to the Account.
It would look something like the following:
/api/data/v9.0/accounts&?select=name&$expand=Contacts(fullname, email)
The only fields in Account that have "contact" in them are:
preferredcontactmethodcode
_primarycontactid_value
address2_primarycontactname
address1_primarycontactname
_tcc_primaryinvoicecontactid_value
_tcc_consultingcontact_value
_tcc_contactlist_value //some custom field that doesn't apparently do anything
_new_foundationcontact_value
_tcc_primaryapcontactid_value
So none of which can be used to look-up all of the contacts... that I know of.
Another way to do it would be to start with the Contact first and then $expand= on the _parentcustomerid_value. But I need to filter on the Account to specify certain accounts that I want... this would just bring over every account and be incredibly slow. I'm not sure there is a way to $filter= on an $expand= value.
So:
How can I query the Account and all the related to Contacts for an Account?
If there is no way, is it possible to use $filter= on and $expand= value?
Trying to keep the amount of queries to a minimum. This could be solved by doing multiple iterative queries, but that will just make it incredibly slow. Or just query everything and piece it together, but that will be slow as well.
Ok, stumbled across the answer: contact_customer_accounts.
Query ends up looking like the following: /api/data/v9.0/accounts&?select=name&$expand=contact_customer_accounts($select=fullname).
As far as I can tell, custom relationships can be used as well, although I have only tested with 1:N types.
Still takes a little while to generate, but works.
I keep on finding myself wanting to add fields to CRM forms that don't actually represent physical fields on the entity. I want these fields to be sent in the Update message, for the benefit of my Plugins...
For example, imagine something like the out-of-the-box contact/address functionality. The main contact address is exposed as a set of fields on the Contact form. However, in actual fact there is some magic going on behind the scenes that causes an Address record to be created for the Contact containing the address details. I don't actually want to reproduce this, but it's a fair example...
Now, I know how to write a plugin that takes the address fields entered in the Create/Update message, and actually writes them into an Address object instead. That is simple enough. It seems the hard part is convincing CRM to display fields on the form for the user to enter the address data.
The only way I can see to do this is to create "fake" fields in the Contact-equivilent form, so that the form editor allows me to add the fields to the dialog. Then I have to filter these attributes out in a plugin, so the fake fields don't actually get written to the DB.
This would work, but involves filling the DB schema with fake columns that will (or should) never have any data in them. This makes future cusomisation of the system more confusing, as there are decoy fields called "DON'T USE - Address1" knocking around in all the GUIs. The problem gets worse when I need a fake Lookup field - this involves creating a fake relationship.
So: Is there a way to achieve the same thing without dumping fake garbage in the database schema?
Is there, perhaps, some way to create a form field for an arbitary attribute in Javascript on the form, such that the Attributes will be included in an Update message?
Sure, I realise I could IFrame or Silverlight something up to cater for this, but I'd rather use the genuine CRM form fields, and handle the data in the Update/Create message plugin hook.
Unfortunately, you have already mentioned the two options that I can think of: fake fields or custom IFrames.
I know it feels "dirty" but I actually haven't had much trouble doing the fake fields thing. Standardized naming conventions are your friend. I prefer fake fields over IFrames because users can still query and filter them in Advanced Find, reports, views, etc.
Just make sure they are readonly and make sure your plugins don't swallow exceptions - you want exceptions to bubble up and cancel the transaction instead of the possibility of the main record getting updated without the children.
We have a number of customers that we have to send monthly invoices too. Right now, I'm managing a codebase that does SQL queries against our customer database and billing database and places that data into emails - and sends it.
I grow weary of maintaining this every time we want to include a new promotion or change our customer service phone numbers. So, I'm looking for a replacement to move more of this into the hands of those requesting the changes.
In my ideal world, I need :
A WYSIWYG (man, does anyone even say that anymore?) email editor that generates templates based upon the output from a Database Query.
The ability to drag and drop various fields from the database query into the email template.
Display of sample email results with the database query.
Web application, preferably not requiring IIS.
Involve as little code as possible for the end-user, but allow basic functionality (i.e. arrays/for loops)
Either comes with it's own email delivery engine, or writes output in a way that I can easily write a Python script to deliver the email.
Support for generic Database Connectors. (I need MSSQL and MySQL)
F/OSS
So ... can anyone suggest a project like this, or some tools that'd be useful for rolling my own?
(My current alternative idea is using something like ERB or Tenjin, having them write the code, but not having live-preview for the editor would suck...)
I think your looking for a reporting tool which is also capable of sending email. Sending a generared report in html or pdf shouldn't be to hard to do as well.
I've used JasperReports in the past for which I think it should fit your needs.
Another good solution is the pentaho reporting tool
You could easily write something on your own.. give them a basic edit control and allow them to use psuedo variables like {customername} {anothercustomerattribute} within the mail body.
On submit either send directly or save as template.
When the template is sent away the script automatically parses stuff like {customername} into the real customers name from the database.
Your own very very simple custom scriptlanguage :)
Everything else like loops and so on would be maintained on serverside. And if you want particular groups of customers to receive the letter, allow the enduser to select from selectboxes or whatever and do the rest on the serverside with pre-defined rules.