Product: Integrations

Article Link: http://help.truecommerce.com/en/articles/10442470-integrations-web-services-api-endpoints

Our Cloud Framework integrations often leverage Web Services & API Endpoints to handle transferring data between Transaction Manager and your Business System. But what are these Web Services and how does an API Endpoint work?

The best way to think of these are to view these as routines or tasks that your Business System can run that Transaction Manager can leverage to perform a desired task, such as creating an order within your Business System.

A Web Service is an independent task built into your Business System or a TrueCommerce Extension that can perform a specific job, such as gathering information on an order or an item for you. So if you need to pull information about an order, you can call that service to perform that task for you.

An API Endpoint is a way for external platforms (Transaction Manager) to reach those Web Services in order to manage your Purchase Orders, Invoices, or Shipments automatically for you.

Web Services are small individual and reusable tasks that can be combined together to provide a wide array of functionalities. Each Web Service has its own individual purpose, and they operate without knowledge of each other. Whether that is to get customer record information, pull inventory details, or to update a shipment - each task has a job to do that it completes based on the information provided to it (such as the order #, or the quantity)

By separating each Web Service into their own unique small task, they become reusable when combined together allowing consistency between larger jobs such as creating an Invoice or a Shipment by allowing both the Create Invoice and Create Shipment job to both use the same Web Service that would pull an Order's information (ship to codes, items, or totals for example) to do overlapping tasks.

An API Endpoint is simply a Web URL that can be reached through a common web request (HTTP for example) that allows Transaction Manager to talk to your Business System.

The Endpoints provide a gateway to performing actions, such as creating Sales Orders or updating Inventory by calling an endpoint to send or retrieve data between Transaction Manager and your Business System in smaller, light weight calls compared to trying to do everything at a single time.

For most Cloud Integrations TrueCommerce will install an Extension or Customization into your cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that comes with TrueCommerce specific API Endpoints that in turn leverage both native as well as custom Web Services to perform EDI related tasks, such as creating a Sales Order, generating an Invoice automatically, or pulling your Inventory to send to your Trading Partners.

This process allows TrueCommerce to to efficiently communicate with your Business System through lightweight calls that can be reused to provide additional functionality.

rev 1/23/2025