API Maintenance
The API maintenance form needs to be set up before you start accepting orders and customer records from either your website, Vision Horizon, Vision Insight.
This allows you to control what happens when you receive a new entry and allows you to setup fields that your external applications can not complete to be filled by the system automatically thus allowing the new records to go straight into the system, anything missing you will have to edit through the interface module.
General Tab
The general tab is used for the general way that the interface runs, and whether you want to save items directly or whether you want to be able to stop everything in the interface for you to process manually. Assuming that you wish to post everything directly then you will only see those items which have issues in the interface.
Options | Explanantion |
|---|---|
Save Options | This has replaced the ‘Save orders directly into VC’
|
Notifications User Manager | This will open a screen for you to select the Group or user to receive the Notifications when an order allocation fails or warehouse submission fails for an order submitted to the VC API, a notification is required for the VC users so that they can action them at the earliest. 
This will be show on the home screen at the top next to the navigation as a Bell Icon |
Default Sales Order Type | Assuming that your web interface is unable to tell us the type of order this is what we would set it to. |
Shipping (Surcharge) | The standard code we need to use to identify shipping on VC when your incoming order has this charge on it. |
Fee (Surcharge) | The standard code we need to use in VC to identify the charge, when this charge is in your incoming order. e.g. Credit card fee. |
Meta Data used for rotation | Is ony used on v1 which was withdrawn on 01/09/2018 It is there for customers for backward compatibility |
Incoming Values include VAT | If we are not told then this is what we need to assume for any order where it is not clear. It would be best to be consistent with this but we realise that this is not always possible. |
Quantity is in cases | v1 format The quantity field is in cases or is this in singles |
 Customer Defaults
Customer defaults are to help you automatically create customers when the customer arrives from the external application, the fields above are mostly self-explanatory and come from the customer setup, which means they are choices of existing fields, such as VAT Code, Currency, status, analysis fields. If your external application can not complete or send these fields then this is what we will use to be able to save the customer record.
The Analysis field will need to be set up in the Analysis Code Maintenance please see link Maintenance
Auto Fill Lookup
There is a feature on the system which allows analysis fields to be automatically derived from other information the customer is requested to provide within their address and contact information.
This is an optional feature that you need to set up before switching on.
The feature will allow you to look up a new customer country, name, address, area, telephone, etc and from one of these fields, it will then base the analysis code on the contents of that field.
e.g. Customer sends in a +44 telephone number so we read this and we automatically know they are based in the United Kingdom.
Order Defaults tab allows you to specify any final order defaults which are needed for the incoming orders, if they are not specified on the inbound file then these are the defaults that we will be using for the order.
Most web sites are very basic in the information they take or store, especially for sales orders where there is no concept of what is required for excise and customs warehouse transactions, so most of the defaults that are provided here relate to this issue and are designed to try to allow those systems to send in basic information which we then try to work out what is is and how it will fit into the system, the goal is that we do not want to manually edit those orders unless we really have to.