netsuite

I've had a chance to listen in on condensed version of webinar that discusses developer tools for the SuiteCloud platform. I have personally worked in Netsuite platform for about a year and have worked with SuiteTalk and SuiteScript development tools to integrate a standalone ecommerce application into Netsuite. Although I do have the administrative privileges, I have not thoroughly explore the available development tools that are offered by Netsuite.

I've created a fair amount of PHP code to create custom searches on Netsuite Platform. With introduction of 2012.2 endpoint late last year, my examples have to be rewritten using the 2012.2 PHP Tool Kit API.

Here are a few examples written with v2011.2 API.

To perform operations on Netsuite records and objects, it is crucial to understand search functionality provided by Netsuite. Netsuite offers basic and advanced search objects on various record types, and their operations are practically the same.

The search results are either an array if there are more than 1 record returned, or an object if there is only 1 record in its result set. As a programmer, the result set must be examined whether it's an array or an object before performing an operation on them.

Netsuite allows an administrator to add custom fields and custom records via GUI. Custom fields are business specific attributes defined by the company to tailor Netsuite. When a custom field is created in Netsuite, the administrator will assign an ID of the custom field and this ID becomes internal ID of the custom field. To show internal ID on Netsuite GUI, it must be turned on by going to Home -> Set Preferences -> General -> Defaults, and checking "Show Internal IDs" checkbox.

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.

NetSuite Suitelets plays vital part in integrating 3rd party web applications with the NetSuite. Writing a suitelet is as easy as writing a simple javascript except that it runs on server-side. Here is a couple of examples on how to write a suitelet. The first example creates a customer of a type LEAD-Unqualified from a POSTed web submissions.

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.

Suitelets are extensions of SuiteScript that allow developers to write custom NetSuite pages and backend logic. Suitelets are server side scripts that operate in a request-response model. They are invoked by HTTP GET or POST requests to system generated URLs, and by default they are invoked by making a GET request from a browser.

Before beginning with SuiteScript (suitelet) development, you must enable the Server SuiteScript feature to use it and also enable Netsuite to display "Internal ID" of entities in the preferences.

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.