Quick Start for QuickBooks Desktop Editions with the Web Connector

I'm going to try to quickly describe here what you need to do to get QuickBooks up and running and interacting correctly with the Web Connector and your web application.

This assumes your doing an integration using the basic features of this framework. You'll need to look at these files for examples:

• docs/example_web_connector.php

This is the main example file that shows how to set up a SOAP Web Service that QuickBooks will talk to and allow exchange of data with.

• docs/example_web_connector_queueing.php

The SOAP Web Service will work off of a queueing mechanism. You'll queue up events within your application, then when QuickBooks and the Web Connector connect you'll build qbXML requests from those actions and send them to QuickBooks. This file shows you how to queue up events/actions.

* docs/example_web_connector_qwc.php

This file shows you how to programatically create a .QWC file, the file that tells the Web Connector how to connect to your SOAP server.

1. Install QuickBooks (if you havn't already) and get a company ready to test with

1. Install the QuickBooks Web Connector on the same computer as QuickBooks: http://marketplace.intuit.com/webconnector/

1. Install the QuickBooks SDK (optional, but nice to have!) (some parts of it only work on Windows, the documentation is HTML and will work on Apple and Linux)

1. Know your MySQL connection string, you'll use it later, it should look like below.

mysql://YOUR_MYSQL_USERNAME:YOUR_MYSQL_PASSWORD@YOUR_MYSQL_HOSTNAME/YOUR_MYSQL_DATABASE

1. Modify docs/example_web_connector.php (or docs/example_server.php if you're using the old code) by changing the $dsn variable to your MySQL connection string.

1. Create a .QWC file to point to your example_web_connector.php URL by…

• Modifying the example on my wiki: Example .QWC File
• OR
• Programatically create one: (see: docs/example_web_connector_qwc.php, or docs/example_qwc.php if you're using the old code)
  • QuickBooks_QWC class is located in QuickBooks/QWC.php
  • Look at the method documentation for parameter documentation, the username is the username that the QB Web Connector will use to authenticate
  • Unless you're running the Web Connector on the same machine as the SOAP server, you *MUST* use a https:// SSL connection
  • Generate and save the output of the function (an XML document) as YOUR_APPLICATION_NAME.QWC

1. Load the .QWC file into the QuickBooks Web Connector by clicking the 'Add Application' button

1. Test the QuickBooks connection by telling the QuickBooks Web Connector to update. The docs/example_web_connector.php script by default adds random dummy customers named “ConsoliBYTE (random number here)” to QuickBooks. If you see that customer in QuickBooks, then communication with QuickBooks was successful, congratulations! Otherwise, you'll have to look through the quickbooks_log MySQL table and the Web Connector log file to find what's going wrong.

NOTES:

1. Make sure you watch the quickbooks_log table, it's useful for debugging
2. Make sure you watch the log file for the QuickBooks Web Connector
3. Set the log level of your QuickBooks server's driver to QUICKBOOKS_LOG_DEBUG, it will make the quickbooks_log table more useful