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PracticalAFAS

A PHP library for communicating with AFAS Profit in a practical way, using either SOAP or REST.

Introduction

This is library code, for use by your own code/another project. Whoever is reading this, supposedly already has an idea of what they want to achieve and what AFAS is, so we won't address that here. (http://www.afas.nl/ - their current documentation is at https://static-kb.afas.nl/datafiles/help/2_9_7/SE/EN/index.htm though that URL will undoubtedly change.)

This code formed through three principles:

• Practical usability (by programmers);
• Making REST API calls work similarly to SOAP API calls;
• Where possible, not obscuring any of the functionality of the API endpoints (e.g. sending several items in one call) or any known arguments to API calls.

The first (and third) principle means understandable code is preferred over future-proof extensibility that creates separate classes for each little thing and introduces loads of boiler plate code. It means well commented code. And it means no unexpected / undocumented behavior. (The validation of input arguments, and of results received from the remote system, covers situations which are unexpected for the programmer, and throws documented exceptions.)

That said: the second / third principle, plus evolving AFAS functionality plus backward compatibility considerations, have made the Connection::getData() arguments illogical in some aspects. But the code is still fairly easily readable (because there's not many different methods) and easy to call for 'simple' use cases.

Compatibility

Version 2 of the library works with PHP5 (5.4 and up) and PHP7.

Client classes for REST and SOAP use PHP's standard Curl + JSON and SOAP + SimpleXML extensions; if these do not work for you, PRs with new / modified clients are welcome.

Automatic testing is done on PHP5.6, 7.1 and 7.2 for the UpdateConnector classes. (I currently don't consider the Client classes in need of tests. There may be some light tests for Connection in the future but it's not on my list.)

Although PHP5.6 is not officially supported anymore, this library will remain compatible with it until there is a real reason to introduce PHP7-only language constructs.

Using the classes

There are a few parts of this library which are not all tightly coupled:

• The client classes can be used standalone to make calls to AFAS connectors. You'll need to know the exact parameters that AFAS expects for their REST or SOAP API; there is a client for both. If you want to keep things close to AFAS' own structure, the REST client seems most suitable. Use RestCurlClient (see the example below) and forget about the other classes. All you need to know is there is one public method, callAfas(), which either returns a (JSON) string with a successful call result, or throws exceptions.

• The Connection class wraps around the SOAP or REST client and abstracts away some parameters which are not so easy to handle. Use it if you e.g.

  • do not like the structure of the filter arguments in calls (including the fact that there are numeric codes for operators)
  • want array data returned, instead of XML (for SOAP) / JSON (for REST)
  • want to specify simpler array structures (rather than the JSON/XML strings which AFAS accepts) for sending data to Update connectors
  • want to be able to change between the REST and SOAP APIs, for some reason. (They do not provide 100% equal results though; see README.get.md for details.)
  • want to fetch a large data set in batches, with as little risk of skipping rows as possible. There's a method in the Helper class for this.

• UpdateObject (plus child classes) can be used to create XML or JSON payloads for Update Connectors, and validate their contents. Their output is strings, which can be used in any way you want (e.g. send the string data through a client class, or through Connection::sendData(), or use UpdateObjects with your own custom code).

• There's also a Helper class with some extra static methods which could be useful for some programmers, but which I did not want to overload the clients / Connection with. (Also, IsoCountryTrait / KnBasicAddress / OrgPersonContact contain some public methods that programmers could use for their own custom validation of e.g. addresses, without using the main functionality of these classes. These are not documented further.)

We'll first discuss the clients and give call examples for comparison purposes with the Connection. You can skip these, unless you're curious about the differences.

Client classes

These could be used standalone to make SOAP / REST calls to AFAS Profit, if you know the structure of the calls. A client class only deals with:

• connection details (e.g. a different REST client could be written that does not use Curl)
• authentication details for making the connection. (E.g. inserting the App token into every call; there used to be different classes doing NTLM authentication instead of tokens.)
• very basic argument validation only (e.g. skip & take being numeric).

The connection and authentication settings get passed into the constructor; not to every individual AFAS call.

You will only use one public method: callAfas(). (There is a second public method: static getClientType() - but this is not necessary for standalone use.) Client classes make (almost) no assumptions about the remote API calls; the exact (type of) remote method and arguments need to be passed to it, and it will return the result body as a string.

RestCurlClient examples

The required options are in the constructor below; see the code for other options.

SoapAppClient examples

The below is (almost) equivalent to the above REST example (except it returns an XML string instead of a JSON string). Note that this is not a PHP 'Soapclient' class; it's a wrapper around SOAPClient.

Connection

The Connection wraps around a Client and abstracts away all argument validation / data processing that is not client specific. It has a.o. its own syntax for filters. It has two important methods: sendData() which wraps AFAS' Update connector, and getData() which wraps all other connectors. (All other methods are getters and setters that you might never need.)

The equivalent to the above example is:

...so if the 'Outputmode' option is not provided, getData() returns an array of data rows instead (i.e. the XML/JSON string gets decoded for you).

Further reading

Get connectors

Update connectors / UpdateObject classes

Hints for developers

Authors

• Roderik Muit - Wyz - Rewrite, re-rewrite and re-re-rewrite.

I like contributing open source software to the world and I like opening up semi-closed underdocumented systems. (Which was the case with AFAS in 2012, but it has gotten better.) Give me a shout-out if this is useful or if you have a contribution. Contact me if you need integration work done. (I have experience with several other systems.)

License

This library is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.

Acknowledgments

• Hat tip to Philip Vergunst & Nathan Vergunst-Kolozsvári @ Your source - producing a first version of PHP code that at least exchanged the correct data, must not have been easy.

• Shout-out to Yellowgrape, professionals in E-commerce strategy / marketing / design. While I produced this piece of software in my own unpaid time, I wouldn't have the AFAS experience without them.