SDK Getting Started

Question

I am a senior developer who is VERY new to Sage. I haven't ever used it or even seen it. A client wants me to use the SDK to get some very basic invoice and payment information out of Sage 50, but even the "Getting Started" info around here seems a little overwhelming. I only just started reading what's already on the forums and blogs here, but if someone can point me directly to a good how-to tutorial without all the accounting-speak, it would sure save me some time and money. Thanks in advance.

fuerstma · Accepted Answer

Hey Chris, 
 Well the first question you need to answer is which SDK you are planning on using. I'm mostly familiar with the .NET SDK, but if you truly ONLY need read access, maybe you could use the OLEDB/ODBC (AKA Database) SDK. The OLEDB/ODBC SDK actually has the most access of any of the SDK's if you only need to read data. 
 Being a senior developer, I suspect you're familiar with retrieving data from a database using ODBC (or you could probably talk directly using a Pervasive library). So you could probably get the ball rolling pretty quickly. 
 If you want to use the .NET SDK, then I think the combination of the the Basic SDK App (should be installed under My Documents\Sage\Sage 50 SDK\.Net Samples\) along with the Quick Start PDF (in the same directory) should get the ball rolling. 
 There's 2 basic steps you must do to start communicating with Sage: create a new Peachtree session, and open a specific company (pages 9-12 of the Quick Start PDF). 
 Reading data is mostly done through "Factories" built in to the Sage .NET Library you'll include in your project. So, a simple lame example, I want to get a list of all the sales tax codes set up for the company... 
 (myPTCompany variable below is the company I mentioned you need to open above) 
 SalesTaxCodeList salesTaxList = myPTCompany.Factories.SalesTaxCodeFactory.List(); 
 salesTaxList.Load(); 
 foreach (SalesTaxCode theCode in salesTaxList) 
 { 
 log.WriteLog(theCode.Description); 
 } 
 The very first time your app tries to access the Sage company, a warning message will pop up in Sage 50 asking for permission (I generally have to restart Sage 50 in order for this message to appear). Once you're granted access you don't need to do this step, until you change and recompile your program or DLL. 
 I believe you'll need an official key from Sage before you can connect to legitimate Sage 50 Companies (you pass this key when you create the session initially) but without a key you can connect to the dummy/sample companies that are included in a Sage 50 install. 
 If using the Sage .NET Libraries, the libraries are tied to the specific client year in Sage. It makes things harder for smaller developers. I have 3 separate projects for the same DLL, each one using a specific Sage DLL (we support Sage 2013, 2014 and 2015). 
 That's roughly everything I wished I knew the first day I dove in to the SDK.

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