jm81-qbfc

==QBFC-Ruby

QBFC-Ruby provides a wrapper around QuickBooks' QBFC COM object, while allowing more or less direct access to the actual COM object.

Obviously, test before using on your production data...

==Find

QBFC-Ruby supports +find+ queries with options, which utitilize QBFC's Query Requests. See QBFC::Element.find for details and options.

QBFC::session do | qb | checks = qb.checks.find(:first, :conditions => {:entity => 'ABC Supplies'}) end

==Relationships

QBFC-Ruby supports loading of related records. These are records represented by "*Ref" in the QBFC documentation. For example, a Check has, among others, a PayeeEntityRef and an AccountRef. These can be accessed via, respectively, check.payee and check.account.

check.payee.name returns the name of the payee.

You can also access the *ID and Name fields of referenced records. Example: for the payee of a Check, check.payee_id and check.payee_name.

==General Examples

A very simple example, finding a single Customer by name

QBFC::session do | qb | puts qb.customer('Customer Name').full_name end

Find all Customer, then return the first in the Array

Next, find the first Customer only

QBFC::session do | qb | customers = qb.customers.find(:all) puts customers[0].full_name puts qb.customers.find(:first).full_name end

Same as previous, but not using a block

sess = QBFC::Session.new customers = QBFC::Customer.find(sess, :all) puts customers[0].full_name puts QBFC::Customer.find(sess, :first).full_name sess.close

Use a QBFC::Session object, but access the COM object

more directly.

QBFC::session do | qb | request_set = qb.CreateMsgSetRequest("US", 6, 0) customer_query = request_set.AppendCustomerQueryRq response = qb.DoRequests(request_set) customer_set = response.ResponseList[0] first_customer = customer_set.Detail[0] puts first_customer.full_name end

==Alternatives

[QuickBooks for Ruby] (docs: http://quickbooks.rubyforge.org, homepage: http://rubyforge.org/projects/quickbooks)

This is a project with similar goals to QBFC-Ruby. I believe the approach is creating Ruby classes that mirror the QuickBooks types and generate / parse qbXML. In my opinion, this approach is more stable and flexible than what I'm doing with QBFC-Ruby, but at the cost of slower development. (As in, QBFC-Ruby was intended as a collection of quick and dirty shortcuts; QuickBooks for Ruby seems to be intended as a much more complete project)

[QBFC/qbXML COM Objects] Using the SDK directly is an option. Unless you need to use QBWC (QuickBooks Web Connector) or have some other reason for wanting to us qbXML, I suggest using QBFC. The SDK documents (see http://developer.intuit.com/ ) are pretty easy to use and navigate.

There are some other libraries on rubyforge in early stages which I haven't really explored.

Copyright (c) 2008 Jared E. Morgan, released under the MIT license