We have a 3rd party creating a Web site for our products and they would like to show part images with orders.
We are and Epicor DT Cloud Customer.
It appears that if we “Import” the image files into Epicor we are not sure how our 3rd party can get to those images.
The 3rd party currently has repository of images on an AWS site that they use to display parts. Keeping the two locations i.e. AWS site and Epicor DB in sync looks like it could be a challenge.
We are musing “why not add a UD field to the Part table that is a Hyperlink to the part image and then create a custom layer that displays that Part Image?”.
That way we will only have to maintain the one location for images (not on the Epicor DB).
What i do not know is since we are SaaS, will Epicor allow fetching an image from an external location to show in our Part Entry Kinetic Form?
I have worked with other customers that are On-Prem and we added a field that pointed to a local UNC - however i have not done this for an Epicor SaaS customer and hoping someone out there has “Slayed this Dragon” in the past (i’m lazy).
Not all roads have to lead to Epicor. There might be better alternatives for managing your product listing content like ChannelAdvisor…err…Rithum? I have been out of the eCommerce game for over 6 years, didn’t realize they got bought or whatever.
Do you ever want more than one product image? Do you plan on selling on other marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Ms. @aosemwengie1 : can the web use an API to get the images. My last recollection is the Epicor images are in a FileStore table that is NOT accessible via BAQ (hopefully i got that right). We were thinking the 3rd party web dev guys could use the Epicor API to retrieve the image? Does that sound plausible?
DaveO
Its correct you can’t get them in a baq. I don’t know if there is a rest service to retrieve them. But if you have a high volume website, how many times is your api call going to hit the epicor server? 10x an hour? 100x? 1000x? It doesn’t take much to crash it. We shut ourselves down trying to host images in Epicor. An external CDN is a better solution. Then both Epicor AND your website can display the same images and you can maintain them in one place.
Thank you Ms. @aosemwengie1 and Mr. @Evan_Purdy.
it sounds like we would be better having all the images on our AWS server and then creating a new PartEntry layer where we would add an Image widget and have Kinetic retrieve the Image from AWS?
Did i summarize that correctly? or am i making stuff up
DaveO
I can’t remember if its that simple or not. I don’t remember if the picture control can fetch things from another domain. You could probably use the website widget or use a BPM to trick it in to thinking its coming from your Epicor domain.
Agree with @aosemwengie1, @hackaphreaka, and @Evan_Purdy. In Kinetic, you only have one image and in eCommerce you often want other images. Images in your database add to your backup/recovery times. They also use more memory You can store images in blob storage but like Alisa says, watch for those egress fees. If you have SharePoint, you could put images in a Document Library and use Office 365 Content Delivery Network to keep files closer to users. These same links can be used in Kinetic as mentioned above.
Curious if you’ve got this to work on a 3rd party site. My understanding is that it’s intended for SPO performance. There is referrer filtering, which will block Office 365 CDN being used as the hosting location for assets which are not SharePoint served. I believe you may be able to set a referrer header on requests but mileage may vary so prolly better to use Azure CDN or blob storage.
You have a good point there Josh, it’s been at least five years when we explored it in a previous life and I wasn’t the web guy there. Blob would work for sure and Dave said the eCommerce site wouldn’t have a ton of traffic. I’d still want to use it in Kinetic too, so there may be more traffic there too.
Another factor worth mentioning is granting that website access to one’s ERP. Yes, security can be configured, but that depends on the methods controlled by Epicor and the website. Inserting a bit of airgap between the two may prevent an exploited website exposing that ERP to targeted security challenges.
Reviewing the O365 CDN documentation, it appears that if you set the library with a Public Origin, it will serve those files anonymously to anyone. The trick is to use the version of the URL from the CDN and not your SharePoint Library.
Correct. You can do anonymously accessible but there’s still referrer filtering. Supposedly you can set referrer request header to myorg.sharepoint.com but.
So anon is meant for public facing sharepoint sites not 3rd party.
Point is, even if it does work, you’re definately outside the bounds of service intent. Which I can neither confirm nor deny doing, for internal facing apps but wouldn’t rely on for customer facing.
My understanding is that once it’s in the CDN (with Public Origin set on the library!), then it’s open to the world.
Our use case five years ago was a little different as my memory is coming back. The most up-to-date document was on the public website. Users were copying them down locally to email to customers. Of course, they get stale on their local drives, so we were looking for a single source of truth to have the Document Library available for internal users but have the web site pull the most recent version from the CDN.
Referrer filtering and authorization are different things. Could be wrong but I believe anon is meant for public facing sharepoint sites not 3rd party.
Point is, even if it does work with a header hack, you’re definately outside the bounds of service intent.
Which I can neither confirm nor deny doing for internal facing apps but wouldn’t rely on for customer facing.
with 