By albanianspirit on

Hello,

My wife is working with a couple programmers on a Drupal e-commerce site. Client has asked to interface the their druapl website to read their inventory from their inventory mgmt. system they have built in Cobol.

I am still to talk with my programmers and the Cobol programmer but does anybody know if this can be done? If so how and how hard is it?

Any piece of info/code would be greatly appreciated

Thanks!

edited by silverwing - moved to post installation forum

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

If the inventory system has a web API (or service) or can be extended with one it should be possible but will require some effort.

albanianspirit’s picture

albanianspirit commented

Thanks for the reply. with the cobol system, the client uses an ISAM file instead of an RDBMS. he said he can extract the values that we need and make them available to us in any format we need them.

What would you say is easiest way to read this values?

Thanks

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

Are you going to extract in realtime or batch? If batch will you need to be able to do updates?

albanianspirit’s picture

albanianspirit commented

I think as a batch through an ops job. Talked to a programmer friend of mine and he said something the lines of what you are saying (I think):

"The programmer at the firm would create an API that would would accept input through HTTPS to a Perl/PHP/C/Ruby/Python/whatever language program that would query the database and then return the results as XML which then your web app could parse and use."

Thoughts?

Thanks

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

I would consider importing as nodes. There is Node Import though it works with CSV and Transformations XML which may help (I have not used it) (there may be others)