Has anyone connected BizTalk with QuickBooks?

Question

We use QuickBooks for financial management, and feed it from a variety of sources. I now need to hook it up to BizTalk, and I'd hate to reinvent the wheel. I've done searches, and as far as I can tell there's no QuickBooks adapter for BizTalk. Does anyone know of anything that'll do the job, preferably something that doesn't suck?

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Doesn't the QB SDK require that Quickbooks be running on the client machine? Is there any way around it?

Answer 1

Quickbooks talks .NET quite easily. You'll need the QuickBooks SDK 7.0 and a copy of Visual Studio.NET, but after that it's very easy to do anything with Quickbooks.

Imports QBFC7Lib

Sub AttachToDB()
    If isAttachedtoQB Then Exit Sub

    Lasterror = "Unknown QuickBooks Error"
    Try
        QbSession = New QBSessionManager
        QbSession.OpenConnection("", "Your Company Name")
        QbSession.BeginSession("", ENOpenMode.omDontCare)
        MsgReq = QbSession.CreateMsgSetRequest("UK", 6, 0)
        MsgReq.Attributes.OnError = ENRqOnError.roeStop

        Lasterror = ""
        isAttachedtoQB = True
    Catch e As Exception
        If Not QbSession Is Nothing Then
            QbSession.CloseConnection()
            QbSession = Nothing
        End If
        isAttachedtoQB = False
        Lasterror = "QuickBooks Connection Error. - " + e.Message + "."
    End Try
End Sub

See http://developer.intuit.com/ for more information.

Answer 2

If you do build the integration code using .NET, you may want to consider leveraging the WCF Line-of-Business SDK:

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/technologies/wcflobadaptersdk.mspx

It's not a BizTalk-only technology, despite its categorization. The SDK is designed to make it easier to create a WCF channel to a LOB application, which can be consumed from almost any other platform.