Hello, we’ve made two BAQs and now we want to use the data with a third party program to visualize it (Epicor is not an option). So we have been thinking if there is a way to create a function which would be scheduled at night to call these baqs and export them to excel format and put them into a Google Drive storage or SharePoint?
We have already set up the Google Drive in Epicor where we put the attachments in Part Entry.
If anyone could give some guidance on how to do that (do we need to use BPMs or REST API) or maybe it is not possible at all. All answers are welcome! Thank you
You can schedule functions to run on a schedule. So, if you write it in a function you can schedule it to run daily. You would just need to write the upload to Google Drive part.
As I understand there is no need for additional licenses from Epicor to access the Google Drive ? And the part of upload to Google Drive would need to be written also in the same function which would be scheduled using C# Custom Code yes ?
Okay, but the part where we would need to write a upload to Google Drive i believe we would need to use a Custom Code block in that specific function yes? Maybe you know where I could find a topic or some guidance on how to do that ?
I’ve just seen the BAQ Export Process tool and it seems that it should work. Another question is where do they put these files into which directory and how to make so it would appear into the Google Drive. One thing I’ve read that it can be done using Windows Task scheduler and PowerShell script which would automatically upload these files into Google Drive just I’m not sure if it would work.
You could do that too. Not sure how that would work with SaaS though. The files land in Epicor managed storage somewhere in Azure. Your script would have to do a server file download I think. Then upload to Google Drive.
You could also put a BPM on the BAQ Get process. So when it runs its executes an upload to Google Drive using the BAQ export @aosemwengie1 mentioned. I use that a lot on-prem to get files automatically dumped out.
FWIW, we do this by pulling data from Epicor API directly into Excel with Power Query Editor. The Excel file is right on our network. Although this requires someone to open the Excel file, and wait for the power queries to finish pulling data. The Power Query editor is very capable, but does get deep into code. Code that most GPTs are perfectly capable of writing for you. If you know how to ask.
Everything after this shouldn’t be necessary to feed relatively modern reporting solutions. BAQ and REST should be all you need, and there’s objective value in not building dependencies into Epicor.
If the final useful output really actually needs to be Excel, @NateS is right! Doing this natively in Excel is trivial. Set up your data source and so on, plonk it into Sharepoint, point a Flow at it to refresh the data connection on a schedule.
It’s more likely that you’re using a relatively modern reporting solution that supports HTTP data sources, which means it knows json, and that’s how REST delivers bare BAQ results.
