php

Netsuite allows you to create a Custom Record to store table of data collected from an external form. For example, you may create an email opt-in form on your external website, and submit the form to Netsuite. The submitted data will be processed by a Suitelet, and stored as a Custom Record in Netsuite. The form must be able to process concurrent users, and hence Suitelet is favored over SuiteTalk (Web Service).

Our business require that we retrieve Quantum View data from UPS, and create or edit ItemFulfillment records with PackageList and Packages. As described in the earlier articles, we've created a UPS developer access key and setup required Quantum View subscriptions for later retrieval of Quantum View events.

Follow the web installation procedure, and if you run into the following errors you'll have to install required php extensions for your Linux version. For Centos 6, here is the steps you can follow to install php-dom and php-mcrypt.

PHP extension "dom" must be loaded.

# yum install php-xml

PHP extension "mcrypt" must be loaded.

UPS Quantum View is one of the most comprehensive reporting APIs available on UPS XML, and yet it's one of the least used API. It provides complete reporting of every shipping activity your organization is engage in. It is a comprehensive suite of services that give you details about your UPS shipments. It can be used to update your ERP with tracking numbers, scheduled and actual delivery dates, and exceptions. The catch is that you'll have to use PackageReferenceNumbers to correlate the package with your sales order number.

I have been tasked to integrate UPS Online Tools with NetSuite ERP using PHP programming language. The job requires retrieving Quantum View reports from UPS on a daily basis, and update NetSuite Sales Orders with retrieved tracking information. By browsing UPS Developer Kit, I am going to be using at least Quantum View API, and Tracking API to do the trick.

1. Join the SuiteCloud Developer Network
To get started with Netsuite development, you'll need a Netsuite account that you can use to communicate with Netsuite. You may sign up with the SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN) as a Community member, and get a free Netsuite account for exploitation. It may take a day or two to get your account approved.

I am collecting a user's name from a web form, and parse out the form field into salutation, first name, middle name, and last name if they are present. Here is the code snippet used to extract the name parts:

Netsuite soap-based web service interface (also known as SuiteTalk) is great for processing batch jobs, but may not be suitable for real-time form processing due to concurrency problem. For real-time processing, the Suitelets may be preferred over SuiteTalk as they don't have concurrent session problems.

Web Service Concurrency Problem

Netsuite provides a soap-based web service interface called SuiteTalk to allow 3rd-party applications to interface with Netsuite ERP system. Netsuite also provides Toolkits written in PHP, .NET and Java programming languages, which will make Netsuite integration easier. We'll use PHPToolkit to create a customer record in Netsuite.