Get shipping rates in FMP?

[Jason_CA]

Hi,

New to the forum and to FM, but not db/scripting in general.

I see how powerful FM can be and would like to get more out of it. One thing I can see that would save us huge amounts of time is automating retrieving shipping quotes from various providers (UPS, fedex, DHL, USPS/Canada Post).

I've searched the forums and looked online in general, the most I've found developer wise was a .php solution that integrates with UPS. Can anyone shed some light on this or pass me some info where I can see how this can be done within FM, or how I can get FM to leverage .php and make this code work?

We have a very simple custom invoicing db that we use right now. My end goal in this respect would be to duplicate the rate calculators on the respective courier web sites within FM, and have FM go out and retrieve quotes from all the courier providers and their respective service rates, and give the user a list to choose from, without having to call 3-4 companies or visit their sites and manually enter it in each time.

Thanks

Jason

PS. I would prefer to develop my own solution than pay $500+ for a third party plugin, this doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult.

Edited November 23, 2010 by Guest
I'm also cheap

[NovaChan]

This isn't going to be the exact answer you're looking for, but I see this question has been unanswered for a few days. One plug-in you might consider is the Web Services plug-in by Beezwax. It does come with a purchase price, but it also lets you roll your own features using whatever web services you can find. I'm not sure what services are out there or which ones are free, but it might be worth a look.

Disclaimer: I work for Beezwax.

[Adam S]

Hi, Jason-

Check out Scriptmaster for this (http://www.360works.com/scriptmaster/). The basic implementation is free. You add some files, build a plugin or just have the Scriptmaster file load first and close each time you launch, and then there are a bunch of extension utilities available.

We've set it up to query rates when we click a button triggering a script with a "Show custom dialog" step pulling the info from FedEx. Jesse has been good at making changes that we've requested to fill out some features (such as adding a switch for residential vs. commercial). Note it does NOT yet show rates for SmartPost and hopefully it will do so someday (add your voice to this).

If you need some sample code from that script please ping us (see various e-mail addresses at http://www.thepurplestore.com/contact) and we'd be glad to send you what we've got.

If anyone else wants to co-develop some filemaker actual Mac / Filemaker /FedEx label printing functionality together we're thinking this could be done cheaper than licensing software from outside....

Hope this helps!

- Adam

[Jason_CA]

Thanks, I will take a look at both solutions and see what I can come up with. It seems that unless I am a web coding genius, there will be some loops to go through to get these connectors to work.

[Jason_CA]

Just an update on this for anyone interested.

I've elected to use a combination of third party solutions and some custom coding to work towards my final solution of an integrated ship quoting within FM from various courier services for internal use. I didn't want to, but I ended up having to learn PHP to accomplish what I've done so far. If you're looking for a complete plug and play solution, this is not it.

My dev station consists of:

- FM 11 Advanced

- Win7 Pro 64 w/ IIS7+PHP5.2 enabled

- PSPad for coding the PHP

- 360Works Scriptmaster (Free)

- Rocketship.it's RocketShipIt Rates & Tracking ($99)

First step was getting connectors to speak to the various services: UPS, Fedex, Purolator, Canada Post, and USPS. UPS, Fedex, USPS, and soon DHL were taken care of with RocketShipIt. The owner, Mark, was very helpful in getting me off the ground based on his php web examples and some tech support over the phone.

For Canada Post, I found some excellent code over here on a personal blog, which worked perfectly, unlike the first 2-3 pages of google results that took me to an outdated and difficult to work with piece of code on sourceforge. I hope by linking to the blog on this forum, he gets a bit more exposure to save some other Canadians a real headache.

For Purolator, I found that THEIR example code was actually well built and easy to understand, so I was able to integrate this within a day without any trouble. Everyone else's documentation was so complex that it drove me towards RocketShipIt to maintain my sanity.

The result: I ended up building a simple php form internally that asked the user for the details of the shipment, which then queried each courier service individually and returned all found results on a single page. So now, instead of having to visit the 4-5 different sites to find the cheapest rate for the customer, we only need to go to this internal page and submit the shipment details once to pull all possible ship methods and their rates. Attached is the output from my simple PHP page.

I learned that each service varies greatly in what results it provides, as well as how it provides it. This led to some very messy PHP code that I'd be embarrassed to share, but would be happy to if someone asked (and maybe get cleaned up by a PHP expert?)

What's next: I have now been fiddling with Scriptworks a little bit and found that it works very nicely with automatically posting data to PHP for quote retrieval. I will be building a special page that only dumps raw data and then see if I can find a way to grab this data to use as fields for selection in FM.

rates.pdf