The eLandings system provides the web services interface specifically to allow seafood processor system to interact with eLandings. The eLandings team recommends making use of the eLandings public web services for transferring data to a third party system.
Advantages
This will allow third-party developers much more flexibility in their development to build exactly what the users need and want. Making use of the web services will also make it far easier to automate data exports from eLandings and imports to eLandings from third-party applications. For example, if a third-party application makes use of the public web services, the third-party application could:
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Using the web services to interface with the eLandings system has a number of advantages for third party systems.
Creating a direct web services interface to eLandings reduces the user actions required to transfer data between eLandings and the third party system. Extracting data from eLandings, in particular, can be done completely automatically. Code can easily be written to update the third-party database from eLandings automatically on a given time interval (for example,
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once each day). The third party database can then be used to run queries. More frequent updates of the database can be configured as needed.
Using the web services interface give third-party developers much more flexibility in their development effort, to build exactly what their users need and want.
For example, the third party application could:
- Easily create a button within the third-party application called "Get Reports" to get a list of landing/production reports from eLandings that match 22 search criteria.
- Easily create a button within the third-party application to "Get Report" to get a landing/production report from eLandings
- Easily create a button within the third-party application to "Save Report" or "Submit Report" to the eLandings system
- Easily create a button within the third-party application to "Get User Info" associated with a eLandings user id
Disadvantages
The eLandings team recognizes that making use of eLandings public web services requires skilled programmers. Programmers who are unfamiliar with the concepts of web services and XML data handling, may find initial success more difficult using this approach. Development timelines should reflect developers familiarity with these conceptsweb service based interface requires that the third party developers be familiar with XML and web services. This can be intimidating to unsophisticated developers, but many resources and tools are available to learn these technologies and to use them effectively.
If the third party system submits reports to eLandings then it will need features to handle business rule violations and error messages from eLandings. Users of the eLandings system handle such error message in the course of entering data and submitting reports. Third party systems need to either recognize errors and take corrective action, or delegate handling of error conditions to users. Both cases require considerable programming effort.