QuickbooksWebConnector

QuickbooksWebConnector is a Redis-backed library for queueing up requests for the Quickbooks Web Connector software to fetch and perform. Responses from the Quickbooks Web Connector can also be handled if you need to take some action with the result.

QuickbooksWebConnector is heavily inspired by QBWC and Resque, so many thanks to the great people behind those gems.

Requirements

QuickbooksWebConnector is tested on Rails 5.0 and 5.1 as well as Ruby 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5.

Usage

QuickbooksWebConnector requires you to specify both a request builder and a request handler for generating and processing your job, respectively.

The request builder should be a Ruby class that responds to the perform method, which will receive any additional arguments you supply when enqueueing the job, and returns the XML to be sent to QuickBooks. This example uses the builder library to generate the XML.

class AddCustomerBuilder

  # customer_id would be passed as the 3rd argument to QuickbooksWebConnector.enqueue
  def self.perform(customer_id)
    customer = Customer.find(customer_id)

    xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new
    xml.instruct!
    xml.instruct! :qbxml, version: '6.0'
    xml.QBXML do
      xml.QBXMLMsgsRq onError: 'stopOnError' do
        xml.CustomerAddRq do
          xml.CustomerAdd do
            xml.Name customer.name
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end

end

The response handler should be a Ruby class that responds to the perform method, which will receive the response XML as a string and any additional arguments you specified when enqueueing the job. This example uses the REXML library to parse the XML response from QuickBooks.

require 'rexml/document'

class AddCustomerHandler

  # customer_id would be passed as the 3rd argument to QuickbooksWebConnector.enqueue
  def self.perform(response_xml, customer_id)
    customer = Customer.find(customer_id)
    customer.quickbooks_list_id = REXML::Document.new(response_xml).root.text('QBXMLMsgsRs/CustomerAddRs/CustomerRet/ListID')
    customer.save!
  end

end

To enqueue a job, you might add a line like this to your model as an after_create callback, or maybe your controller's create action:

class Customer

  after_create :add_to_quickbooks

  def add_to_quickbooks
    QuickbooksWebConnector.enqueue AddCustomerBuilder, AddCustomerHandler, id
  end

end

Installing QuickbooksWebConnector

First, include it in your Gemfile:

gem 'quickbooks_web_connector'

Next, install it with Bundler:

$ bundle install

Mount the engine in your routes.rb:

mount QuickbooksWebConnector::Engine => "/quickbooks_web_connector"

Configure it by creating a file in config/initializers named quickbooks_web_connector.rb

QuickbooksWebConnector.configure do |c|
  # Username, password, path to QBW file
  c.user 'web_connector', 'top-secret-password', 'C:\path\to\company\file.QBW'
end

Now start your application:

$ rails server

Now perform some actions in you application that will queue up some jobs, then run the Web Connector application to have QuickBooks process those jobs.

Configuring QuickbooksWebConnector

QuickbooksWebConnector.configure do |c|
  # Username, password, path to QBW file. Required at least once, can be
  # repeated for multiple users.
  c.user 'web_connector', 'top-secret-password', 'C:\path\to\company\file.QBW'

  # user can accept an optional owner/file ID as UUIDs if you need to supply
  # your own.
  c.user 'web_connector', 'top-secret-password', 'C:\path\to\company\file.QBW', 'eeab2d61-e545-4b02-9fd7-8e3052f9fe35', '0f2eb812-8443-46fc-90ac-32ab81892fd2'

  # Allows you to control which controller is inherited from.
  # Defaults to ApplicationController
  c.parent_controller = 'MyController'

  # Appears in the Web Connector application so the user knows which web app
  # they're connecting to.
  c.app_name = 'Your app name'
  c.app_description = 'Describe your app'

  # Callback that gets run each time the web connector updates
  c.after_authenticate do
    # Enqueue some jobs to run everytime the web connector runs, for example:
    QuickbooksWebConnector.enqueue QuerySalesTaxItemsBuilder, QuerySalesTaxItemsHandler
  end
end

Contributing

Once you've made your great commits:

1. Fork QuickbooksWebConnector
2. Create a topic branch: git checkout -b my_feature
3. Push to your branch: git push origin my_feature
4. Create a Pull Request from your branch
5. That's it!