03. Push a Customer [3:31]
Description: This video provides an overview of how to push a customer from FileMaker into QuickBooks using the FM Books Connector.
http://www.productivecomputing.com/video/video_library/FM_Books_Connector/AddCustomer.flv
Transcript:
Hi, this is Marc Larochelle from Productive Computing with a video demonstration showing you how to push customers from FileMaker QuickBooks.
0:09 Here we have a customer database with one record and some customer information and an add customer button. That add customer button is associated with a script called “Push Customer to QB”. If we look closer at that script, we can see that we are using set field and some functions from the plug in to create our customer in QuickBooks.
0:31 I’ll take you through each one of these now. This first thing you do is you call the function “Request New”. And we can get that here from FileMaker’s external functions area, and then you will see within the header FM Books Connector the different functions that the plug in can call. So if we put in the request New Function, it’s asking for a type, and of course in this case Customer Add is the type we are going to use. That will tell QuickBooks to get ready to add a customer.
1:11 Then after that we need to set the different fields that we want to populate. That command is called “Add Field with Value”. And it’s asking for two parameters here. The 1st parameter is “QB Field Name”, that means the QuickBooks field name. And in this case I will put name, and the value will be the data you want to set to that field. So that will come directly from FileMaker. Let’s do another one of those. I’ll duplicate this and in this case I will put first name, which is the QuickBooks first name field, and I will pull first name from FileMaker and so on and so forth you can add all the fields available to you in QuickBooks. For now I will disable those script steps, because I have a script step here that adds all the fields I need. Each one separated by & sign. So I can actually populate all those fields in a single call. Then after we set the fields we simple begin a session which establishes a connection to QuickBooks. We execute it, which adds the customer and then we end the session.
2:34 Finally after the customer has been added, we can call the “Open First Record” command and grab the list ID of the customer that was simply added a second ago. So if we take a look of this in action, we’ll put the debugger on, and we will click the Add Customer button, and as I step through these steps zero means success. Now we’ve just added all of our fields, we are going to begin session, execute, and end session, open first record, get list ID (the list ID is returned to us here in the company file), and if we take a look at QuickBooks, we can see that in fact AAA Company has been added from our data in FileMaker. And adding a customer is really that easy.